Absolute Mana Dominion: All My Talents Are SSS

Chapter 32: 32 - Elyndor

Two days had gone by since anything tried to kill anybody, which around Greymoor now counted as a quiet week.

Adrien had found a clearing about a mile into the trees, out past the burn line where nobody would come looking for him, and he had spent most of the morning in it with the grimoire open across his knees.

’I need more cards in the deck.’

He turned a page and kept reading.

’Three spells. That’s what I’ve got. One lance, one shock and one domain, and the domain takes everything I have to hold. If somebody walks up that road tomorrow with a bad attitude, I’m out of answers in about four seconds.’

’I’ll learn more with time. The problem is what’s already moving, so time is exactly the thing I don’t have.’

Which was how he ended up on Ice Wall. He had watched Ariane cast it twice now, and both times the window had opened by itself, given him a couple of percent and shut again, and both times it had refused to move any further without him doing the work.

[Ice Wall | 2 Stars]

[Comprehension: 9%]

Adrien put his thumb on the page and let Absolute Comprehension have it.

The talent went in and the structure came apart in front of him. Mana pulled down rather than out, into the ground first and up afterward, which was the entire difference between this and a lance. Water taken out of the earth and out of the air together, thrown into a shape before it froze rather than after, so that the slab came up already solid instead of building itself layer by layer while somebody hit it.

The pressure arrived behind his eyes at the usual rate and he kept reading through it. Twenty minutes, and forty after that. He stopped when his nose started running and found it was nothing worse than a nosebleed, which by his standards now qualified as a good session.

[Comprehension: 100%]

[Spell Learned]

[Ice Wall | 2 Stars | Novice 0%]

’Easy enough. That’s four.’

He got up and shook the stiffness out of his legs.

’Right. I’ve watched Ariane throw this thing at wolves and at a man with a sword. Let’s find out what it actually does.’

He picked a spot eight paces out and reached for it.

[Ice Wall]

The ground gave a short hard crack and a slab of blue-white came up out of it, taller than he was and about as thick as a door, standing there in the middle of a clearing in summer.

[Ice Wall | 2 Stars | Novice 3%]

Adrien walked around it and put a hand flat against the surface. Cold enough to hurt after a couple of seconds. Solid all the way through, with no seams in it anywhere.

He backed off and put a Frost Lance into it, and took a chip out of the face for his trouble.

’So it’s defence, obviously. But it also involves terrain.’

He looked at where the slab was standing and at the ground he could no longer walk across because of it.

’I can decide where somebody is allowed to be. Cut a road, close a gap, take a flank away. That’s not a shield, that’s rearranging the map while the other man is still on it.’

’Useful.’

He dropped it, and the whole slab came apart into water and went into the grass, and Adrien sat down on a rock with the waterskin.

He had been drinking for about ten seconds when a voice arrived from the treeline.

”Am I interrupting?”

Adrien had felt her coming for the better part of two minutes. Absolute Mana Sense had put her at the edge of his range and tracked her the whole way in, and he had gone on reading, because the human kingdom already knew he had an SSS talent and the elves did not, and he had decided somewhere on the road home that he was in no hurry to correct that.

”You’re fine. I’d stopped.” He put the skin down and got up. ”I’m glad you came. Garrick’s been asking after you, and he’s been out of that bed for two days now, so thank you again. He wants to say it to your face.”

”Then we should go and let him.” Amelia came the rest of the way into the clearing. ”Is he walking?”

”He’s walking badly and pretending otherwise.”

”That sounds about right for the ones his age.”

The house made rather more of her arrival than Adrien had expected. Word got round the yard inside a minute that the elf who had put Sir Garrick back together was standing in it, and after that Adrien did not get much of a say in anything. Somebody found her a chair. Somebody else brought food she had not asked for. Two of the kitchen girls stared at her ears from behind a door until Evelyne noticed them and they went away very quickly.

Garrick got his thanks out with a straight back and a stick in one hand and considerably more formality than he used on anybody else in that house, and Amelia looked mildly alarmed by the whole thing and told him to sit down before he undid her work.

And Evelyne held both of her hands and thanked her for Ariane, which took a while, because Evelyne Clairmont did not do that sort of thing briefly.

”You said Edevane,” his mother said eventually. ”Amelia Edevane.”

”That’s right.”

”Then your grandfather and my husband were friends.” Evelyne looked up. ”Good friends, I always thought. They used to spend a great deal of time together whenever we came out to Greymoor for the summer.”

Adrien had known nothing whatsoever about that until roughly that moment.

”They were,” Amelia said. ”That’s part of why my grandfather has been asking to see Adrien. It isn’t only about the forest.” She turned to him. ”He wants to meet you. I can take you today, if you’ll come.”

”Then let’s go today.”

Amelia said her goodbyes properly, which took another ten minutes, and Evelyne finished hers by putting both arms around a girl she had met an hour ago.

Adrien stood by the gate and waited it out.

’She’s been like that since the funeral with anybody who does something for this family. I don’t think she notices she’s doing it.’

They went up into the trees together with most of the afternoon ahead of them.

”Where exactly is this city?” Adrien asked. ”And what’s it called?”

”Elyndor.” Amelia stepped over a root without looking down at it. ”And it’s in this forest. We’re inside it now.”

”How close to Greymoor?”

”Closer than you’d like.” She smiled at the trees. ”The forest is enormous, and I mean enormous in a way humans usually get wrong on maps. We sit just outside the borders of the human kingdom, which saves everybody a great deal of trouble. And we don’t belong to the elven kingdom either.”

”You don’t?”

”No. It’s an odd arrangement, and it’s been that way a long time.” She shrugged. ”We’re family with Sylvamir, and we aren’t theirs. My grandfather prefers it that way.”

Adrien did not push it, because there was something else taking up room in his head. He had kept Absolute Mana Sense open since they left the clearing, out of habit and out of a fairly recent education about what lived in these trees, and it had been giving him back the same answer for an hour.

Nothing.

No wolves. No six-legged thing with the wrong mouth. Nothing black with eight eyes moving through the undergrowth. He had walked through this forest days ago and had spent the entire time threading gaps between predators, and today he could have brought his mother.

’There isn’t a single monster near us.’