Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 3: 3 - Three SSS Talents

The training hall was the biggest room he had seen so far, and it was full of things he had no business touching.

Swords on the west wall, racked by length. Staves along the north, some of them with stones set into the heads. Shields, spears, a row of practice weights, and a stand of six wooden training swords worn down to the grain by four generations of Clairmonts who had all been better at this than he was.

’Great. A whole wall of options for a man with no engine.’

He put himself down in the middle of the floor, cross-legged, in the spot where the boards had been rubbed pale by other people doing the same thing.

He had no idea how to build a mana core. Not really.

What he had was eighteen years of somebody else trying. The old Adrien had gone at this over and over, in this room, in another room, on this floor and another one, until they stopped letting him because of what it did to him afterward. The shape of the technique was in the body like a song you have heard too many times to forget.

’In theory it looks simple enough. Let’s hope it stays that way.’

He closed his eyes and reached for the thing the memories called ambient mana.

He found it immediately, which he had not expected. It was everywhere, hanging in the room the way dust hangs in a beam of light, and the moment he paid attention to it, it paid attention back.

He pulled.

The first of it came in through his skin and went where the old memories said it should go, down and inward, toward the hollow under his sternum where a core was supposed to sit.

Then it started to hurt. The way a limb hurts when the blood comes back into it, except in a place that had never had blood in it, and it went on getting worse in a straight line without ever stopping to plateau.

He kept pulling.

His back locked. Both hands closed into fists on his knees. Something in his chest that had spent eighteen years empty took the first of what he was giving it and clamped down like a mouth.

Heat went up his throat. He tasted iron.

More. He dragged more of it in, and the room outside his eyelids started to make a sound like a wire under tension, and the mana came through his skin faster than his body wanted to let it.

Warmth on his upper lip. Then his ears. Then a wet line running from the corner of his left eye down his cheek, and he understood exactly what that was and did not stop.

’If I let go now I have to do this again in a day and a half.’

His whole body went rigid on the floor.

And then, deep under the pain, something turned.

A weight dropped into place where nothing had been. A slow, heavy pulse that was not his heartbeat and was somehow keeping time with it, and it spread outward through his chest and arms and legs, and the pain went out of him all at once like water off a roof.

He fell forward onto his hands and stayed there, breathing.

There was blood on the boards under his face. A fair amount of it, from three different places, and he took a moment to appreciate the pattern.

”Heh.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and got most of it on his sleeve. ”Piece of cake compared to dying.”

[Awakening detected]

[System initializing...]

[Binding to host]

[Host: Adrien Clairmont]

[System awakened]

Adrien looked at it from all fours with blood coming out of his nose.

’Oh. Oh, shit.’

He got himself upright and sat back on his heels, and said the word out loud because saying it out loud felt correct.

”Status.”

The window changed.

[Name: Adrien Clairmont]

[Title: Bearer of the Severed Heart]

[Age: 18]

[Race: Human]

[Physique: Unawakened]

[Core: One Star]

[Unique Path: Absolute Magus]

[Talents Detected: 3]

[Talent: Absolute Comprehension | Rank: SSS]

Nothing that can be understood will remain beyond your grasp.

You can comprehend the principles, flaws, and possible evolution of any spell, technique, formation, artifact, or structured phenomenon you observe.

[Talent: Bottomless Core | Rank: SSS]

Your Mana Core possesses no predetermined limit.

Its capacity will expand alongside your growth, allowing you to contain and circulate quantities of Mana impossible for others of your rank.

[Talent: Absolute Mana Sense | Rank: SSS]

Mana cannot hide from your perception.

You can perceive its presence, movement, nature, density, and structure with absolute clarity within the reach of your senses.

[Spells: None]

[Inventory: None]

He read the whole thing straight through.

Then he went back to the top and did it again slowly, because the first pass had been mostly adrenaline and nosebleed.

’Name, age, race. Thanks. I did have those.’

[Core: One Star]

’One Star. And every heir in this kingdom my age is sitting on Two or Three, so I’ve come first in a race I entered six years late. Fine. It’s a start.’

[Unique Path: Absolute Magus]

He stopped there.

The memories had opinions about that line, and the opinions arrived fast. A Path was what you were. Mage. Knight. Spellblade. Warrior. Ranger. Nine or ten of them in common use, and everybody in the world got handed one of the nine or ten, and that was the end of the conversation.

Nobody got given a Path that had a name nobody had heard before.

’Not just a Mage. Unique Path.’ He sat with that. ’So I’m not a better version of the thing everybody else is. I’m a different thing, and there isn’t a second one of me to compare against.’

[Talent: Absolute Comprehension | Rank: SSS]

’Any spell I look at, I understand. Including the flaws. Including what it could become.’ A laugh got out of him, short and slightly hysterical. ’That’s not a talent. That’s cheating and they’ve written it down in a box.’

[Talent: Bottomless Core | Rank: SSS]

He read that one three times.

’No predetermined limit. No limit.’ He turned the words over looking for the small print, because in his experience everything has small print. ’I’ve spent nineteen years finding the catch in things people swore had no catch, and there is no catch in this sentence.’

[Talent: Absolute Mana Sense | Rank: SSS]

’And I get to see all of it. Nothing hides.’

Three of them. All SSS.

’Two days ago I couldn’t hold a candle. Now I’ve got three of these and a Path with my own name on it.’ He pressed the heel of his hand into his eye to clear the blood out of it. ’Somebody’s overpaid me and I want to know why before they notice.’

Then his eye went back up the list and stuck on the line he had skipped.

[Physique: Unawakened]

That one had no description under it.

’Unawakened. Which means there’s a version of it that’s awake.’

He thought about it and got nowhere. The memories had nothing. Eighteen years of tutors and physicians and family conversation, and not one person had ever used the word physique in front of this boy.

’Later. Fine. I’ve got a box that says there’s more inside it. I can live with that.’

And then the one at the top, which had been sitting there the whole time waiting for him.

[Title: Bearer of the Severed Heart]

He looked at that for a long while.

’Severed.’

The memories had something for this, and what they had was gossip. That the youngest Clairmont was born wrong. That the boy had a weak heart, that he took his medicine and stayed in bed and did not run in the corridors, and that his mother had gone white in the face any time anybody asked about it directly.

He got hold of the collar of his shirt and pulled the whole thing off over his head.

The scar ran from just under his collarbone down across the left side of his chest, and it was old, and it was wide.

Not a normal wound made by an accident but a cut somebody had made on purpose, and closed on purpose, and closed well.

Adrien put two fingers on it and felt what was underneath.

A heartbeat. His. Steady, ordinary, a little quick from the blood loss.

And under that, off the rhythm entirely, slower and heavier and enormous, something else was keeping its own time.

’Alright.’ He took his hand off his chest. ’That’s a problem for the day after tomorrow.’

He got to his feet, and the room stayed where it was, and his legs held.

There was a rack of staves on the north wall and every one of them had been out of his reach since the day he was born.

Adrien walked over, took the plainest one down, and turned it in his hands.

”Let’s give them something to write about.” he said to the empty hall.

...

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