Mentored Training 10

Author's Note: Hey y'all, I just noticed I made a mistake on this post. I left out roughly 1000 words of the actual chapter, so if you read it and thought it didn't make sense, that'd be why. Sorry for the mistake, here's the proper chapter!

After lunch, and checking on our pets, we go back out to continue training and practicing. Our teacher focuses on Skylar next, examining her new abilities with pride and interest. Skylar demonstrates how she can shape her shadow magic freeform into different weapons, which is very useful in a fight, as her dungeon runs with us yesterday proved.

Once Skylar has finished her demonstration, Olivia has her set to work on training with a different area of magic entirely: stealth. That’s never been the way that Skylar’s powers seemed to manifest, so I’ve never really thought about that before. I suppose it is the area classically associated with shadow magic though, and it’s possible Skylar’s just never really trained for it, which is why she’s never done it.

The results are a little mixed. Skylar can draw shadows in to herself and use them as a form of cloaking, such that you can’t see that it’s her. The problem is that this doesn’t make her invisible, it just makes her a human sized blob of shadow. There’s very clearly still a person under that shadow, and it wouldn’t be useful for stealth in the daytime.

Still, Skylar being able to do that means that she can potentially sneak around a lot easier in darkness. I’d imagine at night, when shadows are most of what there is, she could blend in quite well. I make the suggestion to Olivia that I could change the light level to see how well Skylar blends in, and she accepts. I click the button on the menu and the light disappears from the barrier, replaced by a beautiful night sky.

Skylar tests out her new ability, and she does indeed blend in better in the darkness. The night sky is beautiful and bright, and doesn’t lend itself the best to her cloaking, but it’s certainly better than the daytime. I fiddle around with the settings to see if I can make the sky darker, and I manage to find the option to do so.

Without the bright stars and moonlight, she blends in even more. She is still somewhat visible, but I have to look really hard to see her. Olivia changes into her aeroray form, to see if the enhanced eyesight can pick up Skylar. We move into a few exercises where Skylar does her best to sneak around stealthily, and the rest of us try to find her.

We find that without the light and without knowing where she is, it’s actually really hard to pinpoint where she is. Especially once our teacher gives her the advice to stay stock still when one of us is looking at her. “Invisibility is useful, but until you get much more powerful, you cannot rely on it totally. Your powers will not hide the sounds your footsteps make, nor will they hide your breathing.” She explains.

“And with how your cloaking works, covering yourself in shadow, it is much easier to spot you when you are moving. Our eyes are naturally drawn to movement, to anything that disturbs a still space. Even if you think you have been spotted, you must resist the instinct to move. It is all too easy to give the game away, give up, when you think you have been spotted, when in fact, the one searching for you has not noticed you yet.” Olivia advises.

Skylar nods seriously, taking it all in with a determination that warms my heart. I love how she’s trying her best with this. As our teacher explains, this stuff might seem silly or light hearted now, but it could save our lives one day. All of this is how we get to playing a form of hide and seek, consisting entirely of Skylar hiding and the rest of us seeking.

We’re all having so much fun with the exercise that we don’t notice that a full hour passes, and that it’s now mid afternoon. Olivia praises Skylar’s performance in the exercise, and the umbramancer accepts the praise with a small smile. I can tell she’s proud of herself too, and she should be. She did amazingly.

Lastly, Olivia moves on to me and my powers. She has me test a variety of things, including the range of my different spells and whether I can modify any of them. Knowing the range is incredibly important, being able to judge it is even more so. On the modification side of things, the results are fairly disappointing, although expected.

My spells aren’t freeform. I can’t manipulate ice, fire or mana in any kind of a freeform way. My spells do exactly what they say they do in the descriptions, nothing more, nothing less. I cast the spell and it does what it says. I find myself slightly disappointed by this and hoping that I get a way to manipulate my chosen elements in a more free way.

We establish the effective ranges of my different spells, and their relative stopping power. Olivia turns into her Tetramand form, which is relatively durable, and has me throw some spells at her. The results in that department are also disappointing, and a bit of a wake up call to me.

“You have amazing crowd control capabilities. Against an army, all six of us would eviscerate them. But Gemma, you need to work on getting more powerful spells. So far, these spells have served you well, but if you are going to take on Mathias, you need to have a higher damage output. From what I understand of your powers, you are absolutely capable of that. Just make sure to focus on that.” She explains.

I nod, thinking a bit. I have four different methods of directly damaging people, or rather, two methods, one of which has three different sub methods. Using my weapon in melee combat, and using my spells, arcane, frost and fire. I don’t have any pyromancer class since I can only master one element, so that leaves me with three different ways forward.

I can invest further in my melee combat, or I can try to get higher damaging spells in either the arcane field or the frost field. Melee combat would require a better weapon, and one that would actually allow me to use the enchantments on it, which isn’t something I can do if I want to keep using my current armour.

There is a possibility that a perk in the warrior class would allow me extra hand slots for a weapon, but it could just as easily be in the gamer class, if at all, and as Olivia points out, even despite the fact that it isn’t a sure bet to hope for that, the current enchantments on my axe are not sufficient to deal the damage I need to.

That being the case, I’m left with arcane magic and frost magic. Both schools of magic could conceptually deal out hefty amounts of damage, but I’m not sure which one I would want to go with. Skill evolution points could also be useful, potentially evolving ice bolt or mana bolt into something with even more damage.

I ask Olivia about this and she isn’t very sure. “At the end of the day, these are your abilities. As far as I understand, you have an enormous potential power. Your abilities are already very strong, you are breaking the rules of magic as the rest of the abyss understands them. This is not something that many people can do.”

“With that being said, it strikes me that you could do both. I am unsure that it would be the efficient approach, but with the things that I have heard about the most powerful arcane and frost mages in the abyss, each of them are extremely dangerous, and each of them possess the abilities to hurl out tremendous amounts of damage.”

“Of course, I am not saying that you would be able to stand up to them. We have no idea how powerful you are. But I do not think either choice would be the wrong one. Both can be incredibly deadly in the right circumstances, so I would ultimately say that the decision is up to you.” She says. I nod, still thinking about it when Olivia announces that we’re moving on to the final part of our training for the day.

“Learning to combine your powers is an extremely important aspect of working together. And ultimately, it is and will be one of your greatest strengths. Coordination, learning to work together, to help each other, to use your powers to augment one another, these are all important. You have already seen the effect this can have with the two of you working together to create a sandstorm, Paige and Mia.” Olivia explains.

The two of them nod at their names. “There is however, much more you can achieve. The first thing for you to learn is how to infuse objects with your power.” Our teacher says. At her words, we look at each other in confusion. I’ve never heard of anything like that being done.