A New Star Chapter 81 (Patreon)

Anastasia

I stared at the dead crab beast, a type not seen all that often in cave-based dungeons, with a bit of a sense of relief. Maybe she didn’t realize it, but the help from Alexandra, or Alex, at just the right times with her lightning affinity had turned what could have been a very challenging fight, even for a team, into something rather easy. And that was just our fight; I was distinctly avoiding looking over at the center of the room, shivering just a bit in response to remembering what Alex had just done. The level of combat prowess she had displayed, not just her skill with weapons, but her overall skill in battle was…staggering. I had never seen anything like it, even when the senior instructors at the academy had given demonstrations of how battle should flow. I had never seen such a level of measure and controlled violence, a horrific destructive energy channeled through an unimaginable amount of skill.

“Time to rest,” Gorge said, and I instinctively glanced between him and Alex, but the young teen was content to let him take control.

“Don’t look at me about it,” Alex said to me, her swords already sheathed again as she stood with her hands on the hilts.

“Aren’t you in charge?” I asked. Maybe a little bold, but it certainly seemed a pertinent question, at this point.

“I’m not in charge,” she immediately rebutted. “I’m just here to…coordinate. I would suggest listening to me, especially about combat matters, but you can make your own choices. And, for that matter, I wasn’t picked to lead. Jhan was, at first, if I seem to recall correctly, though I don’t think that’s something you decided…”

I was going to respond but I thought about her words and her insinuation first. It was true that Jhan had been assigned the leader of the group and we had all just sort of…gone along with it without asking too many questions. Maybe that was a part of our upbringing as nobles or part of the conditioning that the academy put us through, but we had also been taught various things at the academy that didn’t line up with the current situation. There were very few exceptions for teams doing dungeon delves, particularly first explorations, in picking their own leader, and this shouldn’t be one of those exceptions. The more I thought about, the stranger it became in my mind, but I pretty quickly realized exactly what Alex was getting at. Or, well, what I thought she was very much getting at.

Gorge had already stepped up into more of a leadership role than Jhan had even been in, and he was the one issuing orders right now. While he was the youngest here, with the exception of Alex, who was clearly an anomaly and didn’t count towards any of my classifications, he was doing the best job of keeping the group organized. If this was a test, it was a rather serious one, but I was already sensing that Jhan’s days of leadership were about over. I didn’t even have to consult with the rest of the group about it; I immediately changed his classification in my mind to something much lower than the standing I had been affording him before.

“How long should we rest?” Gorge asked Alex after a minute, which did take away some of that shine I had just put on him. Maybe he needed to be reclassified already. Being in the field always made keeping track so tedious.

“Don’t look at me; I’m not in charge,” Alex refuted. “I would suggest enough time to eat and briefly relax, but not sleep, but keep in mind that that’s just a suggestion.”

We proceeded to do exactly as she had suggested, which amused me quite a bit, though some of the humor was cut out of it when I thought of why we were following her little bits of ‘advice’ without asking any questions or pushing back. Thinking of her effortlessly slaughtering a room of beasts that would have taken a long, incredibly coordinated effort from the rest of our group, likely leading to a few injuries and a lot of downtime, still put a bit of fear in me. If that was what she could do without even putting all that much effort into it, just how capable was she really? And another, even scarier question: Was she better against beasts or people?

We had some food, which was an experience in itself. Sure, the academy had prepared us for what I would classify as very harsh conditions, but that still didn’t make eating camp stew any more of a pleasant experience. Thankfully, we were doing a short enough trip, close enough to civilization, that we didn’t have to rely on things like salted meat and hardtack to make up the bulk of the stew. We didn’t have to use them at all, which was a blessed relief, considering just how nasty salted meat could be. I remembered the first time we had had it, which was also the first time many of us had camped and the first time most of us had had to do any kind of cooking; the academy had really wanted to throw us in the deep end with that camping trip. We hadn’t really understood what salt pork was, at the time, which led to a rather disastrous outcome, as we had just shaken some of the salt off and thrown it in the pot. It wasn’t entirely without reason that we expected that would work, but the memories of the overwhelming taste and feel of salt in the soup and nothing was still enough to make me gag more than five years later.

Fortunately, we weren’t dealing with any of that today and we had at least one person in the group that could cook competently, so we would be spared the worst of overcooked pork, under-soaked hardtack, and way too much salt. It took a few minutes, by which point we had had time to rest, and I noticed Alex, still further down the tunnel by a bit, with her arms crossed as she watched our group. The part that made me extremely nervous was the rather serious frown she was sporting, so much so that I started looking around to see what the danger was or what had gone wrong. It only took me a handful of seconds to realize the danger was us, and what had gone wrong was that, other than Alex, there wasn’t anybody interested in keeping watch while we were basically camped. In the middle of a dungeon, one with we had already established had roaming beasts within.

“Gorge!” I gestured at the man urgently.

“What?! What’s the problem?” he asked, maybe displaying a bit of his youth still as his nervousness came out in full force, rushing over to my side while glancing all over.

“I think we’ve forgotten something. Something very important,” I reminded him, casting my eyes back and forth across the small camp we had made.

“We’ve forgotten something?” he asked, scratching at his head, the hair of which he kept rather close cropped.

“Think about camp basics, Gorge,” I said.

It didn’t take him long at all to get it, though he glanced at Alex first, who just shrugged at him. “Tina, Sasha! Take the watch. We’ll make sure you get fed, but we don’t want to be snuck up on.”

The two of them replied without any hostility, taking up positions down the tunnel in either direction from the group. It might not have been the very best arrangement, but then again, we weren’t planning on pitching our tents, we were just taking a short break for some food. Still, it was a little embarrassing that we had forgotten one of the most basic of the basics as soon as we had had a difficult fight. Well, a difficult fight that came after witnessing something really terrifying; the only time I had witnessed something like that was when my great uncle had given demonstration for the family. Even the senior instructors at the academy didn’t compare to him, and that was exactly the same kind of feeling I got from Alex when I watched her fight. It wasn’t one single thing, not just her swords or her affinities or how she put everything together, even, but was a some combination that brought everything together to an even higher level. It was the same feeling that the truly powerful, those that even supposedly ‘strong’ people feared, gave off around them, and it wasn’t until she truly demonstrated her combat prowess that I was able to understand. I still wasn’t able to properly classify her, but I was able to put her in an overall category. A very scary category.

“I want to see some improvement in the next fight,” Alex said to us after we had broken camp. She hadn’t joined us in eating, at least in partaking in the passable stew we had made, but she had eaten something, some kind of bar or trail product.

“Who put you in charge?” Jhan asked in a surly tone, which was a rather stupid thing to do, considering the prowess she had just earlier displayed. Also, unless my memory was suddenly worse than great-grandfather’s, didn’t she say she had already absolutely destroyed the little prick in a duel? It was becoming very clear that Jhan wasn’t really fit for much of anything, let alone leading our group, and I was perfectly happy to have the much more competent, and pleasant, Gorge take the role instead.

“Nobody put me in charge,” Alex replied equitably. “You’re free to ignore my advice as you would. It’s no skin off my nose, but I think I have some good insights. The choice, as always, is yours.”

“Jhan,” I said, before he could spit out whatever stupid reply he clearly had building. “Shut. Up.”

“Fine, do whatever,” Jhan huffed, walking over to lean against the wall of the tunnel and cross his arms while he sulked. He really still was a spoiled child, but then again, from what I knew, his father hadn’t been overly generous with him growing up. Not that he was excessively harsh, but I think this was more Jhan naturally being a stupid ass than anything his family had done in raising him.

“What should we concentrate on?” I asked, eager to get some advice from someone so much more skilled than us and yet so much younger.

“Plenty of things,” Alex said, rolling her eyes. “If I had a month, I’d train you properly, but we don’t and I won’t, so listen well. All of you need to work on your weapons, as what I’ve seen so far is not at all impressive, even considering your ages. You’ve had some of the best trainers in the country, before, during, and after your time at the academy. I would expect better of what you can do than what I’ve seen so far. Put some more effort in.

“As to more tangible advice, well, you’ve seen me fight. I think the key understandings are mobility on the battlefield and better use of your affinities at all times. Remember, you should have at least three strong affinities and they should mesh at least somewhat well together. There have been a lot of times already where I’ve seen many of you rely on a single affinity at a time. Even when you’ve used several, it’s often been by calling on one affinity, anchoring that affect, then slowly calling upon a second affinity and anchoring a second effect before releasing your attack.”

“But, what you’re talking about is split-casting. That’s not even something they train most people in at the academy; it’s considered an advanced technique that takes years to master,” Sasha protested. I could feel the nervous energy radiating from the bright girl from across the tunnel, but at least she was participating.

“You don’t need to be a master to fight,” Alex scoffed. “Are you a Master with even one weapon? A Grandmaster?”

“Well, no, obviously not,” Sasha replied, a bit defensively. “That kind of skill takes years and years to master.”

“So does what I’m trying to teach you,” Alex said. At a few confused looks, she explained further, “You don’t need to master what I’m teaching to use it in combat. Even a half-hearted combination of two affinities will often have more power than a single affinity, and the key is the speed. The way you are all anchoring one affinity at a time when you want to use two or three in an attack is very slow; you’re only able to do it that way because of the team covering each other. Even if you don’t master chaining and switching affinities to the degree I have, and I’m not a great master of the art myself, it’s the speed that will be key. Speed keeps you alive in battle. In a big, stand-up, knockdown fight, fast lives, slow dies. You don’t have to be the most skilled, the most powerful, or the fastest, but learning to be faster and smoother will make you far more deadly.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not that easy,” I protested, thinking about us trying to learn to multi-cast in the middle of an unexplored dungeon.

“It’s not, but it’s not rocket science, either,” she replied.

“Rocket what?” I asked, sharing a confused glance with Sasha and a few others.

“Never you mind that,” Alex huffed, shaking her head. “Just pay attention to what I’m about to do.”

The next hour, before we proceeded any farther into the dungeon, turned into terribly difficult lesson in multi-casting. Jhan, of course, complained as much as I had ever heard someone complain about training in my life. It was doubly stupid, as he didn’t have to participate, and this was an opportunity that was rarer than gold. Alex was clearly a master of battle, despite her young age, which led to a few conclusions I was definitely discussing with Father and Mother when we were done with this dungeon. Denying oneself the opportunity to learn from a master of a craft, particularly when that craft was battle and killing, was the genuine height of stupidity, but I had come to expect nothing less from Jhan. I had already placed him in about the lowest classification possible, and now I was considering moving him below even the meanest of peasants, given his current performance. It wasn’t even that difficult, at least physically, but then again, I suppose that mental acuity and enlightenment had never been, and were never going to be, Jhan’s strong suits. But I was also not giving the lesson my all, letting him distract me from how Alex was explaining how she thought about and activated her affinities, which was critical; mindset was a very key part of activating and properly using affinities, and understanding the mind of someone so skilled would let us all progress by leaps and bounds.

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