Infinite Mana - Chapter 190: Offensive, Defensive, And Situational (Patreon)

They reached the fifth floor before Aldren finally called a halt. By then, the steady rhythm of marching armor had deteriorated into uneven footsteps, interrupted whenever someone adjusted a stiff shoulder or dragged his hammer over loose stone.

The passage opened into an old excavation chamber with a raised platform along one wall. Discarded timber and empty ore baskets suggested miners had once used it regularly, but the dust covering everything showed they had stopped coming recently. Aldren checked the adjoining passages before directing his men toward the platform. It offered room to sit without blocking the corridor, and any approaching golem would have to cross a clear stretch of stone before reaching them.

“We will take a break here. Two hours.”

Several shoulders lowered immediately. One soldier sat before removing his helmet, then struggled with the fastening beneath his chin until a companion leaned over and helped him without making the joke he probably intended.

“Eat. Drink. Check your equipment,” Aldren continued. “I’ll watch the entrance first.”

Sieghart counted the marks inside his notebook while the soldiers settled. Twenty-three healing casts since they entered, which meant one hundred and fifteen silver owed and considerably more practice than he would have received working alone. The injuries had varied from split knuckles and strained wrists to fractures that required multiple applications. First Aid had repaired the damage, but it could not make the soldiers forget the effort their bodies had spent earning it.

Several men were breathing through open mouths despite the chamber’s cool air. Sweat darkened the padding beneath their armor, and the soldier whose ribs Sieghart had mended earlier lowered himself carefully, testing his side before committing his weight. Nobody looked ready to collapse, but the difference from the confident group assembled outside was obvious. Their bodies remained functional largely because Sieghart kept repairing them; their dwindling energy was another problem entirely.

“If anything starts hurting differently, tell me,” he said. “Don’t wait until we’re moving again.”

The soldier with the injured ribs nodded without looking offended. Earlier, he had barely acknowledged Sieghart’s introduction. Apparently, repairing somebody’s chest twice improved working relationships faster than introducing yourself politely.

Sieghart closed the notebook and found an empty patch of stone. He was not especially tired, although concentrating on injuries while watching unfamiliar fighting styles had left his eyes aching whenever Magic Vision remained active too long. They had barely stopped between encounters. Once a golem fell, Aldren checked his soldiers, inspected the remains, and extracted whichever materials could be recovered without turning the exercise into a mining expedition.

A loose ore cluster, an exposed core, a crystal lodged behind a shattered plate. Anything requiring prolonged excavation stayed behind, while the pieces Aldren selected disappeared into a plain brown backpack carried beneath his cape. Throughout the descent, Sieghart had tried concentrating on the formation rather than the captain’s possessions. That became increasingly difficult once Aldren began collecting pieces Sieghart would have needed both hands to carry.

It looked large enough for provisions, spare clothing, and perhaps a helmet. Aldren had already pushed several cores, heavy mineral fragments, and one piece of ore nearly as wide as his chest through its opening. The shape never changed noticeably. Neither did the way it hung from the captain’s shoulder, despite containing enough material that an ordinary bag should have stretched its stitching or pulled him sideways.

While the others unpacked food, Aldren added another glittering fragment he had kept in one gauntleted hand. It vanished beneath the flap without a bulge, a shifting pile, or the clatter Sieghart expected. A mimic pretending to be luggage remained one possible explanation. Given everything Sieghart had encountered since reincarnating, a creature willing to swallow expensive rocks and patiently wait for more did not sound especially unreasonable.

“Something wrong?” Aldren asked.

Sieghart realized he had been staring at the bag rather than its owner. He looked up before his interest became any more obvious, although Aldren’s expression suggested that opportunity had already passed.

“No. Thinking about storage.”

“Useful thing to have around.”

The captain offered nothing further, which answered the question almost as effectively as an explanation. Expensive equipment did not become less expensive simply because an interested stranger wanted to know how it worked. Sieghart had heard of storage items whose interiors exceeded their visible dimensions. The references usually appeared beside descriptions of rare materials, exceptional craftsmen, and prices that made even wealthy merchants reconsider what they actually needed to carry.

Some kind of spatial compression seemed likely. Expansion made equal sense, although he had no idea whether those described different processes or merely two ways of misunderstanding the same magic.

Magic Vision revealed a faint pattern around the opening when Aldren moved the flap. Beyond that, Sieghart could not follow anything clearly enough to distinguish a genuine internal structure from overlapping enchantments. He resisted asking whether the captain would let him examine it. Dismantling borrowed storage equipment inside a dungeon seemed like an excellent way to discover how expensive apologizing could become.

‘I should be able to learn how it works once Magic Vision reaches higher levels… Insanely high levels.’

The bag could wait. The men resting around him offered something more immediately useful, especially now that Sieghart had watched them fight long enough to separate individual habits from their shared training. Every soldier carried a hammer, yet that similarity concealed surprisingly different approaches. Some fought as though one clean strike should settle everything, while others built an opening through several smaller movements before committing real strength.

Magic Vision had helped him notice something he could not properly explain yet. Aura still refused to appear with the clear colors and channels that made ordinary spells relatively easy to study. Instead, he saw disturbances around it. Ambient mana pressed outward when a soldier reinforced himself, almost outlining the pressure around his limbs. Those disturbances shifted before each attack, even when no actual spell was forming.

Watching those disturbances through repeated exchanges let him almost trace the vital energy beneath them. It was like following a moving creature through grass: he could not see everything, but the movement still gave its position away. His own reinforcement usually felt quiet by comparison. Mana settled around the body, supported it, and continued functioning as long as he maintained the spell’s structure. The energy came from a reservoir he supplied.

Aura seemed to make the body itself work differently. Everything tightened together, from the feet braced against stone to the fingers gripping a weapon, until the person became something that could briefly perform impossible physical work. A furnace was the closest comparison Sieghart could find. The body consumed energy, produced extraordinary output, and kept demanding more fuel as the fighter pushed it harder. That explained the sweating, hunger, and heavy breathing afterward.

There were no literal flames beneath their skin, naturally. Sieghart knew the difference between a useful comparison and an excuse to stop asking questions, even if he occasionally ignored that distinction while inventing spells.

From what he had observed, their Aura use fell into three broad types: attack, defense, and situational. He doubted reality separated them neatly, but organizing the differences made the individual techniques easier to understand. Offensive Aura was the easiest to identify. Before a heavy strike, the disturbances around a soldier’s body tightened in sequence, following the leg, hip, shoulder, and finally the arm responsible for delivering the blow.

One tall soldier favored sweeping blows that began almost at the ground. His rear leg drove first, his hips followed, and the hammer arrived last, carrying the force of the whole movement into a single point.

Aura reinforced the chain as it accelerated. Without that support, Sieghart suspected the man’s own joints would suffer before the hammer ever reached its target, especially when the weapon stopped abruptly against dungeon stone. The energy did not end at the hand. When the hammer struck, Sieghart could almost follow a brief extension across its head, holding the weapon together and concentrating the impact instead of letting the shaft absorb everything.

That soldier had cracked a golem’s chest with one blow. Immediately afterward, however, he needed to recover the hammer, reset his stance, and gather himself before attempting anything comparable again.

Another man used the same principle differently. He kept his hammer close, struck with short motions, and released smaller bursts at contact, gradually widening fractures without committing his whole body behind every swing. Both relied upon offensive Aura, but one preferred a devastating opening strike while the other maintained pressure. Their weapons alone would never have told Sieghart which approach he was about to face.

The roadside bandit’s thrust belonged somewhere in that category too. Every reinforced movement had driven force toward the sword’s tip, turning a simple stab into an attack that nearly punched through Sieghart before he could react.

Defensive Aura worked differently. Rather than gathering everything toward a strike, the fighter reinforced the structures that would receive the impact and connect it to something capable of bearing the force. The broad soldier resting beside a broken basket had demonstrated it particularly well. When a golem swung, he braced his hammer across the attack and settled his weight before the collision arrived.

The disturbance spread through both arms, across his shoulders, and down toward his legs. He still slid backward, but his body remained aligned instead of folding around the blow like an ordinary man’s would have. That was not the same as creating a barrier. The attack reached him, and he had to deal with its force physically. Aura simply made the body and equipment receiving it capable of surviving much more.

It also required judgment rather than merely possessing enough energy. Maintaining equal protection everywhere appeared wasteful; the more experienced fighters concentrated it near expected impacts, then redistributed it once another threat demanded their attention.

Sieghart glanced toward the man with the recently repaired ribs. His mistake had not been possessing no defense; it had been preparing one part of himself while leaving another exposed to a blow he thought would miss. Greater reserves might let someone maintain heavier protection continuously. Even then, Sieghart doubted it was free. The broad soldier had eaten most of his ration already and was reaching for another piece without slowing.

Situational Aura was harder to summarize because it covered the adjustments that made the other two useful. Speed, balance, recovery, positioning, and finer control all appeared there, though not always through identical methods. One lean soldier rarely struck first. He moved around the golems while his partner engaged them, using abrupt changes of direction to reach joints that remained protected from the front.

Sieghart initially thought he was simply faster than the others. After watching longer, he noticed how little effort the man wasted between those bursts, keeping ordinary steps ordinary until position actually demanded more. Aura strengthened a planted ankle, drove one leg sideways, then shifted through the body before the next landing. The result resembled Impulse, except the force came from the man himself rather than wind pushing him.

Another soldier used smaller adjustments. A foot settled securely on loose gravel, a wrist corrected the angle of a deflection, and a shoulder dropped just far enough that a stone fist passed above it.

Those movements lacked spectacle, but they saved energy by preventing expensive mistakes. Sieghart had spent enough time launching himself across battlefields to appreciate the advantage of moving only as far as necessary. Sharper reactions seemed involved as well, although he could not yet tell where training ended and Aura began. Several men responded to movement while looking elsewhere, without giving him any clear magical pattern to examine.

That uncertainty mattered. Declaring every useful movement an Aura skill would leave him blind to ordinary technique, and the bandit had already demonstrated how dangerous the combination became when Sieghart underestimated either part.

Aldren eventually noticed his attention moving from soldier to soldier. After checking the nearest passage entrance, he returned to the raised platform and stopped beside Sieghart with his helmet tucked beneath an arm.

“You’re watching them more than the dungeon.”

“I’m trying to work out what they’re doing differently.”

“With the hammers?”

“Something like that.”

The captain looked toward his resting men, then back at Sieghart. His expression suggested interest rather than offense, which was useful because Sieghart had no intention of explaining how much his eyes were actually revealing.

“Attack, defense, and situational use,” Sieghart said. “That’s what it looks like.”

“That’s a reasonable way to sort it.”

Sieghart nodded slowly and considered the shifting patterns again. Even soldiers who strongly preferred one approach had changed their reinforcement during combat, responding to immediate problems rather than remaining locked inside a single category.

“A man can favor one,” Aldren added. “He still needs the others. Hitting hard won’t help if he falls over before the hammer lands.”

“And defending?”

“Won’t win much if he can’t make anyone stop attacking him.”

Sieghart looked toward the formation’s quieter fighters again. Their individual specialties mattered, but cooperation let them cover weaknesses that would become dangerous alone. He could now remember several exchanges that demonstrated exactly how. The heavy striker could commit because somebody watched his recovery instead of competing to land another hit. The defensive fighter could receive a blow because his companion used that moment to damage the exposed limb.

That explained why the captain had been so irritated by the earlier injury. The formation was supposed to distribute those risks, not merely place several strong people near one another and hope their enemies cooperated. It also changed how Sieghart thought about his own support. Protection could reduce the force reaching a soldier, while Mana Barrier could interrupt an attack before anyone needed to spend Aura enduring it.

If a barrier bought the heavy striker time to reset, his companion could preserve energy instead of intercepting another fist. A small defensive spell might therefore improve the whole formation without making any individual visibly stronger.

Sieghart liked that considerably more than standing behind everyone and repairing bones afterward. Healing remained useful, but preventing the injury could preserve movement, concentration, and enough endurance to reach the next floor safely. Not like he was planning to show his cards.

He kept that thought to himself. For now, watching was enough. Sieghart wanted to recognize the difference between an opponent gathering strength to strike, preparing to withstand retaliation, and adjusting position for something that might be much less obvious.