Mentored Training 5

“Next order of business: I need to see your armours. I notice that you all wear a similar armour, and I wish to inspect it, if I may.” Olivia says. I take my helmet out of my inventory wordlessly and hand it to her. She inspects it thoughtfully. “Practical, durably, stylish. How is your visibility in this?” She asks me.

“Perfect. There’s no impairment.” I tell her, and she nods. “Do you know what enchantments are on your set of armour?” She asks. “Enchantments for resizing to fit the wearer, comfort, being light weighted and manoeuvrability to start with. They’re all elemental armours, they work best with elemental mages. Mine works with my frost magic.”

“The description says that it’s ‘mage armour’, I’m not entirely sure what that means. However, it does give a percentage bonus to my mental stats, 20% bonus damage with frost related spells and a 20% resistance against ice and fire damage.” I tell her. Olivia nods in understanding.

“The mage armour part means that it is made for mages. That much is obvious, but the idea is that the enchantments of the armour do not help much with melee combat. The magical materials used in its construction will provide a level of resistance against melee attacks, but there are methods of protection similar in overall power level that are better suited for melee combat.” Our teacher explains, and we nod.

Olivia inspects each of our armours in turn, and finds the same thing with each. I find myself once again, grateful to have her in our guild. We’ve learnt so many things about magic and the way the abyss works from her. She’s helping to elevate us all in power, and training us all to be ready for the fights we’re going to need to have.

With morning tea over, we go outside to start our training for the day. Olivia and Mia start to spar with Paige, while Ivy, Skylar and I go into a dungeon to help Skylar test her new power. Before I open the dungeon, we take a last look at Paige to make sure she’s doing okay.

Olivia is already instructing her on new and different ways to use her powers. I smile at the sight, knowing that with our teacher’s help, we’re going to have a much better shot at making Sydney a safe place and protecting each other from harm.

We go into the giant rats dungeon and figuratively let Skylar loose. She giggles happily like a madwoman as she figures out just how ridiculously powerful she is now. Previously, she had a tough time using her magic to hurt regular enemies in dungeons of my current level. Now, she can effortlessly swat the rats aside with her magic.

She creates more varieties of constructs than I’ve ever seen before. Her ability to shape her magic seems to have vastly improved, and rather than just walls and spears, I see shields of all shapes and sizes, giant hands, wrecking balls, anvils, blasts of sheer shapeless power.

She’s unstoppable, tearing through the packs of rats like they’re paper. Buzz saws, throwing knives, cannonballs, clamps for restraining enemies, even a fridge just for fun. Ivy and I don’t have to do much, we just stand back and let Skylar handle it. She’s laughing elatedly, and I’m not sure I’ve seen her this happy since we first got together.

Once the boss comes out, she tells us to stand back and let her handle it. We take a step back and let her have her fun. We’re both delighted at how happy she is with her new powers. The rat queen charges at her, running at full speed. Skylar stands her ground and with one swipe of a giant hand, sends the boss careening to the side.

Skylar uses her magic to form steps, taking her upwards into the air. I’m not sure if she can fly, but she can definitely use this method for more movement options and to gain altitude. She stands over the rat queen as it gets up, looking up at her. Skylar pelts it with a variety of household objects for her own amusement.

A piano, a sink, a bathtub, a bookshelf, a lawnmower, and a car are just some of the things that Skylar manages to dream up to drop on the boss, probably helped by her massively increased intelligence stat. The bombardment of shadow constructs leaves the boss battered and bruised, doing its best to limp away from the hail of magic.

Skylar runs to the edge of her makeshift platform and doesn’t hesitate to dive gracefully off of it, towards her opponent. She’s not that high up, so she doesn’t have far to drop and the boss can’t make it out of the way in time. Skylar draws in shadows in a split second, the dark coloured magic coalescing around her and forming into a meteor shape around her body.

She impacts the boss dead on, visibly using her power to add extra **** to the blow. The rat queen’s legs fall out from under it, and it thumps to the ground, barely still alive. Skylar rolls out of the impact swiftly, conjuring a giant cushion to soften her landing. The magic dissipates in an instant.

She conjures a large blade and forcefully brings it down over the head of the boss. The blade goes through the rat queen as it disappears into dust, the dungeon beaten. Skylar turns to us, an exhilarated smile on her face. “That was amazing! I can just do that now! Oh my Gaia, thank you so much Gemma!” She giggles happily, sprinting over to me and kissing me gratefully.

I wrap my arms around her and kiss her back, giggling with her. Her happiness is infectious, and Ivy cuddles the newly powered up umbramancer from behind. “Always my love, you deserve it. I’m glad you’re so happy with the results of everything.” I tell her. She beams up at Ivy and I. “I really am happy. So so happy.” She says.

As we exit the dungeon, we see Paige sparring with Olivia. Our teacher is clearly holding back, but Paige is doing her best. She kicks up dust and pebbles from the ground, which itself has been cleared in a circle around her. She flings the earth at Olivia as she charges at the goth girl in her four armed Tetramand form.

Olivia puts her hand to her face, doing her best to shield herself from the irritating material, but some gets through the gaps in her giant hands and she emerges from the cloud of dust, dirt and earth with her vision partially obscured. Paige draws earth up and uses it to reinforce her fists, another new thing she can do.

Ducking under a punch from Olivia, Paige drives her fist upwards, delivering a pretty solid uppercut to our teacher. The punch, heavy hitting as it is, would have dealt some serious damage to a mundane person. The lady of the beasts doesn’t even flinch, and comes back with a punch of her own. The two of them trade blows as we watch, with Olivia holding back and Paige managing to hold her own.

We leave them to it to keep grinding away at dungeons, Skylar still accompanying us to further test the limits of her abilities. With Skylar’s massively increased power, we actually manage to get through three more dungeons before Olivia calls a break for lunch, giving Ivy and I, a level up each, and most of the way to another one. One more level, and I’ll reach 100 agility, which I’m interested to see the milestone for.

During lunch, we see Paige displaying the same signs of exhaustion that we saw from Skylar yesterday. Our gothic girlfriend doesn’t talk much around Olivia anyway, because of how shy she is, but it’s easy to see that she’s feeling quite tired. Olivia is proud of her progress and how she’s learning to use her ability in new ways.

We get straight back to training after lunch. Skylar feels that she’s had enough fun with Ivy and I in the dungeons for today, and decides to stick with Olivia to help train Paige. After Ivy has made sure that Paige is all healed up, we run through another dungeon, and I’m super excited to reach the 100 milestone for agility.