The Pinnacle Warrior

“If you need to flood yourself with mana to the point that you pass out, then do it.”

Astrid’s vision swam as tried to remain standing, but a formless terror, one that carried with it the knowledge that she’d failed her party, friends, and family, and it overwhelmed her. Self-mastery-aligned mana flooded her body, especially her head, and there was a brief second of clarity, but even before she could catch her breath, she was reduced once more to a shivering coward. Tears ran down her face, and she tasted blood in her mouth from where she’d bitten her cheek, and her mana continued to drop precipitously.

She used her last two charges of Body to bring herself back up to half of her reserves, but even with that help, it continued to drop quickly as she tried to find the source of her terror. Her vision swam with her tears, and she let out a choked sob as she whipped her head back and forth. Shadows lunged at her from every side, leering with long, deadly faces that threatened agonizing death. She still had mana remaining when her heart could no longer take it. Without another movement, she collapsed into a fetal position with broken cries.

As soon as Astrid fell, the terror and dread disappeared, and Miriam appeared beside her.

“You did really good. You’re okay now. Regardless of how many times you ask me, though, I’m done doing this for a couple days. I’m not going to continue tormenting you, even if it’s good training, without giving you real time to recover.”

Astrid couldn’t respond, because although the magical fear faded, the physical responses remained. Her heart thundered in her ears, and despite all of her training to the contrary, she continued hyperventilating as her lips and gums began to tingle. Despite holding her breath and slowing herself, her vision slowly tunneled. Maybe half a minute passed before she was able to get herself back under control, and Astrid then recovered remarkably quickly. She still didn’t quite understand what exactly the impact of Immortal Warrior’s Body boost to passive recovery on mental or spiritual recovery was, but it seemed to have made her significantly tougher in those respects than she’d ever been before.

“Thank you, Miriam,” Astrid finally gathered herself and looked up at the Assassin. When Astrid had mentioned to the Golden Fist that she wanted to better develop her resistance to fear and things like it, Isana pushed the Assassin forward and the decision was made. Over the past three days, Astrid had trained like this several times a day, and every time, Miriam had expressed her distaste, but this was the first time that she took a firm stance declaring her unwillingness to continue.

“We are here to train with you, and if this is what you need, that’s what I’ll do. Even so,” Miriam answered Astrid‘s gratitude, “this feels disturbingly like bullying a child, and I’m not okay with that.”

She didn’t say anything more as she stepped away towards Muti. It was unsurprising that they gravitated towards each other, as people with similar Classes tended to train better with each other than with people who were totally different Classes. As Astrid got to her feet, Aleksandr stepped forward and raised his fists. Knowing what was coming, Astrid rolled her shoulders and summoned all of her equipment, even though the man in front of her wore nothing but a comfortable tunic and pants.

Despite having long since done the calculations of how much a level 5 or even 10 Warrior would struggle to damage her as she was now, she also knew how strong she was. With the acquisition of her boon, her Power was over 400 and she was a Warrior that had honed her strength over the course of well over a decade at this point. When the leader of the Golden Fist had laughed at her concern, she’d realized that there was as proportional a difference between a level 10 and herself as there was between herself and Aleksandr’s minimum level. Beyond that, there were three entire tiers separating them, so she really didn’t need to worry.

“You ready?” He asked as Astrid rolled her shoulders.

“I’m conscious, and might as well train when I’m exhausted,“ Astrid answered as she struggled to her feet.

Without further ado, she stepped forward and swung her hammer down at Aleksandr’s left shoulder. He raised his arm and instead of being hit by the hammer head, he used his forearm to arrest the attack’s momentum on the haft. Astrid didn’t slow, striking out with her shield as her foe gathered himself. Her shield’s edge cracked into his right side, which he moved with, but she’d left herself open in her haste to press the attack. His left hand released her hammer as it snapped forward and caught her by the back of the helmet, though he had to jump to reach. As soon as his fingers caught her, a Skill made him unbearably heavy. Her back sagged forward as she tried to slip her shield between herself and the Arcanite tier Soldier.

His right arm kept her left from coming between them as his knee smashed into her forehead. The helmet didn’t crack or shatter, but the sound rang in her ears as he went to press the attack. His same knee blurred towards her head, but she twisted her neck in a circle and dismissed her helmet at the same moment. The move was quick enough to dislodge the bind, and Aleksandr reached to grab her braid. Astrid dismissed her hammer to catch his wrist and twist it as she tried to leverage her own grab into a potential grapple.

Her opponent snapped his hand back out of her grasp as Astrid continued to try to land hits on him. Her dismissing the hammer gave her enough space to engage with this training partner instead of struggling to strike with the weapon so close to her own body. Though he was a Soldier and a spear his weapon of choice, Aleksandr had been delving for decades, and he knew his way around a brawl. More than that, he wasn’t so stupid as to back out of close proximity to give her more space to swing her hammer while she held that advantage. She’d already learned that lesson painfully several times, and she didn’t need to learn it again. Blunt Weapons’ Mastery, as it was rolled into her equipment Skill, guided her right fist and shield to press in on the attack against her trainer.

Though his attributes were so much higher than hers that he could have just overwhelmed her with sheer strength, he did his best to hold himself back to about as strong and fast as she was. There was nothing they could do about the reality of his attributes being so much higher, but he held himself back as much as he could, and Astrid‘s shield hit his lower ribs. Instead of bending him over or breaking his bones, though, the shield jolted to a stop as if it had met an immovable wall.

“I’ll slow down a little bit for that, call it some cracked ribs,” Aleksandr said as he adjusted his posture slightly.

By necessity, these training spars went like this where, when Astrid got a hit in, Aleksandr would explain what that strike would have done to him as he adjusted his posture. For Astrid’s part, she just had to deal with the very literal pain he inflicted on her. As if to punctuate that thought, he ducked under her shield and punched her hard in the kidney. Astrid gasped in pain as he refused to slow down. She lowered her shield to protect her left side as she turned, but he saw it coming and feinted as if he was going to continue circling around her. She spun faster, but Aleksandr planted and came around to her right side, where he smashed another fist into her ribs, just below her breast.

The air whooshed from her lungs and her teacher was far from finished. She swung her shield in a wide arc to force him away as she summoned her hammer to keep some distance. The spar continued that way for a short while, Astrid growing more exhausted by the minute as she was forced to face this foe without being able to recover. With no uses of Body remaining, she could only continue to fight without recovering her mana. As such, she only used her physical body as she fought against the much stronger man until finally, she scored a half lucky, half skilled hit on the outside of his knee with the bottom edge of her shield. Even as she used all her strength, she couldn’t manage to make his leg twist.

“That would be the fight,” he declared simply, stepping back. “At best, someone with around 400 in Fortitude would have a broken knee. Broken ribs and knee on the same side? That’s the end of the fight.”

Astrid stumbled back three steps and nodded to him in acknowledgment. Then, she allowed herself to fall into a seated position on the ground nearby. As she gasped and prodded at the various injuries that patterned her body, she looked at the rest of her party. Felix was recovering from his own spar against Aleksandr, his sweaty face and trickles of blood from his nose betraying the results of that fight. Seeing her step away from her own sparring match, Felix gave a weak thumbs up and joined her in looking at the rest of the party’s efforts.

Muti was enjoying the release from magical study as Miriam and Leah gave her practical teachings regarding how to apply magical effects in battle. She had slowly learned what exactly her boon meant by “the ability to channel mana into magical effects, similar to spells”. Part of that ambiguity, the party had learned, stemmed from the fact that there were ambiguous uses for this mana. Instead of being able to cast spells, Astrid could only think of the way that Muti had decided to use as pretty similar to her father‘s talismans. She felt a prick of guilt at thinking of him as she looked at a Barbarian, even though he’d never told her to hate Barbarians or anything like that. He’d been enslaved for two decades, and she knew there were all sorts of scars that remained from that.

She shook her head and continued to watch as Muti spread the fingers of her left hand and pushed towards Miriam. A tendril of smoke flowed out of the Ambusher’s hand, and Muti began cursing fiercely to herself in the barbarian language.

“You’ve got the right idea of it, but you’re treating the mana in these tattoos like the mana that fills your body, instead of like an enchantment or inscription,” Leah instructed. “It’s not a Skill, don’t treat it like it is. That’s how you end up pigeonholed into certain paths, keep yourself flexible. That’s what this boon is doing for you..”

“Instead of pushing it out, it will push itself out when you do it right,” Miriam added. “Just correctly activate the mana flow to begin the effect.”

Just as Miriam had said, Muti’s left hand was covered in scrolling swoops, evidence of her being “mana-touched”. Astrid didn’t need to understand it herself, but she recognized that, effectively, Muti’s body now had more mana in it than she could use, ordinarily. That’s where her boon came in, and she could use that excess mana in her body to create semi-permanent tattoos. Frankly, it was a blessing that Isana was around at the time of experimentation, because only her understanding of mana had allowed Muti to begin to use this aspect of her boon so effectively and so quickly. Without the Dungeoneer’s assistance, Isana explained with a morbid enjoyment, Muti would have occasionally burst with a magical effect that she could scarcely control.

“The mana only obeys my body, not my mind!” Muti’s frustration was deserved, even if surprising. She ordinarily kept a rather tight hold on her emotions and losing her cool like this was quite out of character. Astrid laughed a little as she thought that, because she had taken years to understand that her friend expressing herself with violence or constant ambushes as well as testing Astrid at every opportunity wasn’t at all an expression of anger or frustration. It was just the way that she was, and the way that she had been raised. Whenever Muti had an opportunity to learn something, she would go still and pay attention with the same coiled readiness of a cat ready to pounce.

And she could not easily understand how to use mana the way that her boon required and that drove her crazy.

For Astrid’s part, she could see the progress that Muti was making, though it wasn’t fast and the Ambusher was probably a month of hard practice away from being able to do anything with her boon in a fight. The fact that she went from somebody without any real magical skills or experience to somebody who could create magical effects in just a couple days was impressive enough. But as Miriam and Leah returned to instructing what had gone wrong with Muti‘s execution of pushing her mana through her tattoo, Astrid looked at the two magical men from the party.

Benedict was miserable. There was no other way to say it, and Astrid didn’t blame him. Isana hovered near him, her eyes open too wide as she nodded for him to continue with his attempts at cleansing the poison from his body. His face was green, and a puddle of bile was on the ground in front of him. Where he knelt, hands and knees on the ground, he grimaced, but his complexion improved quickly. He pushed up to an upright position and spat to the side before he grabbed a canteen and swished what Astrid knew to be a potent liquor in his mouth before spitting it to the side.

“You still haven’t understood the interaction between the mana in the enchantments of your equipment and in your boon as well as your Skills,” the Dungeoneer said with a too-happy smile. “You should be able to improve the efficiency of your boon with Silvertongue, even if it says it has to be a spoken Skill. It’s your fault you don’t understand the interaction between the mana in a Skill and a bone. It’s all your mana regardless, you just need to access it and channel it correctly.”

“Woman! You’re not speaking sense,” Benedict protested, having been subjected to her apparent sage wisdom for days without making progress that she seemed to think should be simple for him.

“No, you’re not observing mana. I understand you’re weak and still young, but you should understand the interactivity between the three resources and the ambient mana! You spent so long in the Trials, did you not feel how the mana flowed through the ground and into the monsters that surrounded you? Did you not feel the gradual sublimation of that same mana into your body as well as the accelerated pace at which that same additional mana allowed you to grow in level?”

Despite her position as a highly respected Arcanite tier delver, Isana constantly evolved into rants that talked about how mana was the core of everything, and nobody understood them. At least, none of the Wanderers could, and only Saul of the Golden Fist seemed to somewhat understand what she was saying.

Saul and Skandr were the only ones who seemed to unconditionally enjoy the training they were going through. Felix and Astrid both felt the need for what they were doing, they were practicing using their Skills and boon in general combat as well as pushing their limits in all sorts of fights, while Muti and Benedict both suffered through the necessary training. Skandr was like… Skandr acted like Astrid had when her mom had given her an entire silver to buy whatever treat she wanted from Ahna’s family’s bakery. Excited, constantly jumping from one subject to the next, and, if Astrid was totally honest, cute in a childish kind of way.

Every morning, Skandr would wake up and eat just fast enough to begin following Saul around. The other Wizard, a man that the wanderers learned somehow had not yet finished his evolution quest to Arcanite tier, was a quiet man. Astrid was again struck by the fact that she felt no mana from him at any time, even when he was actively casting a spell. That was terrifying in and of itself, but when he cast spells was what had Astrid’s blood run cold. With casual sweeps of his hands through the air, his fingers blurred through a series of sigils that left glowing lines of intricate detail hanging in the air, and he cast spells that were more impressive and intimidating still in fractions of seconds.

Every day, Skandr continued exploring different possibilities to do with his spells, experimenting further with wind, and making his cloud heavy with rain. Understanding what made a tornado and how to sustain it. The rest of the party didn’t understand what he was getting at when he started to get into the details of how his new spells worked, but his frustrations with being unable to consolidate his learning as well as he wanted to were long gone. 

Instead, he spent most of the day with his nose in his notebook, taking copious amounts of notes with diagrams of sigils, instructions on how to move each part of the arm from shoulder to fingertip to hurry spellcasting, studies on how weather worked, and more. Seemingly, anything that crossed his mind was immediately explored in a theoretical, and then a literal way, and he exulted in the days of rest that they all had.

“Leah,” Aleksandr called over his lover. They weren’t annoying about it, but the two were obviously together and, whenever they were near each other, would hold each other’s hands, run a finger down the other’s back, and other casual displays of affection. The woman who had been Astrid’s idol looked over and approached when Aleksandr crooked a finger at her.

“What is it?”

“Would you work with Felix? Fight as if all of your attributes were around 250 to 280.”

She nodded and pulled two blades from her hips, leaving three in their sheathes, one on each hip and the one from behind herself. Hearing how limited her attributes were going to be for this fight, a part of Astrid wondered how this was going to be miserable for her poor frontliner friend. After all, they weren’t going to be giving him some lackadaisical ego boost. Before she could watch and take in the sight, the voice of an old man interrupted her relaxation.

“Would you do me the honor of having a conversation?“ Greely asked.