Mentored Training 8

After morning tea, Olivia calls on Paige next to test her powers. Our teacher starts by having her do the same things she was doing yesterday in her sparring matches. Drawing up earth from the ground and using it for various things, reinforcing her fists, hurling large boulders and creating depressions and craters in the ground.

Paige finds that she has a much easier time doing all of this than she did yesterday, and is quickly destroying the landscape around our palace. I panic slightly at this and look into my Kingdom menu to see if there’s anything I can do about it. Luckily there’s an option to reset the landscape to pristine condition. On seeing that option, I close the window, satisfied, and watch Paige’s testing.

Olivia has the gothic terramancer test her new range of control, which turns out to be much further than Ivy’s. Paige doesn’t need absolute control for a lot of her direct attacks, so the range where her control starts failing matters much less. If she still has the ability to lift things at a certain range, that’s all that really matters for direct combat.

Of course, there are many other things she can do as well. Olivia has her test to see if she can tunnel through the ground. Paige concentrates, and it takes her a few minutes to figure out how to control it the best she can, but she does manage to open up a tunnel straight down for a few metres, wide enough for her to fit through.

Before she actually goes into the tunnel, Olivia instructs her to practice her control over this first. Opening and closing small tunnels and sinkholes, both of which could be useful in certain situations. Eventually, Paige is confident and skilled enough that she wants to try opening up a tunnel for her to go through. Olivia allows it, and so Paige opens up a small tunnel, with an entrance and exit only a few metres apart.

Paige jumps down the hole and wriggles her way through the tunnel, popping up on the other side. Olivia has her continue to test and practice this, and eventually, they figure out that Paige can tunnel through without opening up the tunnel beforehand. With enough practice, she has the control to open up the tunnel in front of her.

She can even close up the tunnel behind her, allowing her to move through the earth without leaving a path for anybody to be able to follow her, which is potentially an extremely useful ability for certain situations. Once Paige has finished testing and practicing this ability, Olivia has the goth girl meditate for a while.

I’m unsure the reason for this at first, until our teacher starts talking to her in a calming, reassuring voice, guiding her along for what to feel. Something I hadn’t considered before, but that Olivia is already knowledgeable about, is the ability of elemental mages to sense things through their element. In Paige’s case, that means she can sense things through the earth.

Olivia sets up an exercise where we all move around to different places on the ground, and she gets Paige to point to where we are, without looking or listening to where we might be. After a bit of practice, Paige even learns to identify which one of us is standing where, based on how much our weight impacts the earth. It’s a really impressive skill.

After her meditation exercise, Olivia starts Paige on seeing how effective her control is at reshaping the earth. Under our teacher’s direction, Paige shapes a variety of simple structures from earth that she raises up. Simple shelters, walls, giant spike pits, reinforced cover and other such ways to build and fortify positions.

Paige manages it all, smiling at her newfound power and versatility. In addition to shaping structures and shelters, Olivia has the terramancer work on reshaping things smaller as well. Paige creates smaller dart like projectiles em masse, to fling at opponents. As the lady of the beasts mentions, sometimes lots of smaller projectiles are much more effective than one giant projectile, especially since lots of smaller ones are much harder to see and avoid.

Paige even figures out how to create some smaller utility items, including crude chairs, tables and bowls. They might not be the cleanest of items, but they would work well enough in a pinch. This gives Olivia an idea to test just how many different materials related to the earth that Paige can actually control.

Things like clay, metals, oil, they’re all related to the earth element. There are mages out there who can control such things, and we have no way of knowing how far Paige’s control extends until we try it out. Therefore, we order a bunch of different things from the abyss auction to test it all out.

We order coal, crude oil, a few different simple metals, iron, nickel and copper, as well as some gold and silver. We order some sand, clay and some types of rocks. We also order processed materials to test if Paige can control those at all, brick, concrete, glass and ceramic. It doesn’t take too long for the raw materials to get here, and once they do, we start the testing.

The results are mixed, but interesting nonetheless. Paige can use her magic on coal. She can’t use her magic on any of the types of metal that we’ve ordered, nor can she control oil. She can control sand and clay, which is quite handy to know, and as expected, she can also control all the simple types of rock that we’ve ordered.

Her powers don’t work on any of the processed materials either, which is a bit of a shame. It would have been extremely overpowered if we were fighting inside a brick and concrete building and Paige could control the entire thing, to the detriment of our enemies. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case, but it does line up with everything else we’ve figured out about her powers.

From everything we’ve learnt, Paige’s control seems to be relegated to raw earth and non metals. Olivia says that it’s not out of the question that the terramancer’s powers could one day expand to include other things as well, but at the moment, she can’t do much for metals and processed materials.

After the test of control, Olivia has Paige work on her density control of her power. Packing earth more tightly together and increasing the density of something can increase the damage it deals when thrown, so it’s a useful skill to have. We find through experimentation as a result of this that Paige’s control is linked to weight rather than size, which is a little annoying, but we can work within that anyway.

Putting all of this together, Paige is now a versatile and effective member of our guild, with a lot more control and ability than any of us realised before. I’m incredibly thankful to have Olivia in our guild. She’s been incredibly helpful so far to helping us realise the full potential of our abilities, and while we may be able to get stronger in raw power with my help, with our teacher helping us, we can refine and get the most of our raw power that we possibly can.

It’s Mia’s turn next to receive help from Olivia with her powers. I reset the landscape in preparation for Mia’s training, but the very first thing that Olivia has us do is order a few things from the abyss auction. I’m surprised and more than a little alarmed that you can actually buy the things on the auction that Olivia has us order.

Napalm, agent orange, mustard gas, white phosphorus, and several other toxic substances, some of which have been used in chemical warfare. It’s a little chilling to have each of these extremely deadly chemical agents to just show up on my doorstep, and I don’t even want to think about the type of people who would normally buy this stuff, or sell it for that matter.

Olivia picks up the protective casing of one of the materials, the writing on the side reading, ‘Napalm - WARNING, HIGHLY FLAMMABLE’. She shows it to each of us, pausing for a few seconds to let us all soak it in. I send Ivy some quick images of what napalm actually is, and what it does, and I can feel the horror setting in at what we have now at our home.

“This is napalm. It is one of a number of highly dangerous compounds that can potentially be used to our advantage in certain situations. Variations of this compound have been used through the last one hundred or so years in mundane warfare, to devastating effects. It is, quite frankly, an inhumane substance, as are a lot of these chemicals you see here.”

“It is considered a war crime in the mundane world to use several of these. We are not bound by such law, but that does not mean we should use any of these lightly. You must understand in addition that while these substances are incredibly dangerous by mundane standards, they are nothing compared to the horrid things that exist out in the abyss.”

“Magical compounds exist that can cause far more damage than chemicals like these ever could. They are very rare, since they take incredible skill and talent to make, and can usually only be produced in very small quantities, but they do exist. It is likely substances exist that could even eliminate Mathias, although we would likely be eliminated along with him, if we were to use them.” Olivia continues.

“My point is this: how far are we willing to go, in order to meet our goals? I would hope that in a situation where we used something like this, that it would be after all other options have been exhausted. But, it may potentially be useful. Every avenue towards effectiveness is worth knowing. Even if we never use it, having something like this in our back pockets could save us one day.” Our teacher says.

We all nod gravely. We all understand the implications of suggesting something like this. Committing war crimes is not something that’s on my to do list, in fact it’s very far from it. However, Olivia’s right. It’s worth knowing how to use it effectively, even if it’s almost certainly never going to be worth it in a moral sense.