Chapter 75: Seasons Change (Patreon)

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"I truly believe we have the ability to take the top spot," Velic began. "We have the power for it. But as Instructor Barry said, we need to learn to work together. Other teams have advantages in this field, as I know Valeria's team all knew each other quite well prior to the academy. And while I've worked extensively with Marvenal in the past, I haven't had the privilege of the same with you two. So I think it's best if we take this time to familiarize ourselves with what each of us is capable of."

As he finished speaking, he stepped forward to the center of the room and turned to face the single training dummy opposite him. It looked similar to the ones Cayden was used to, but the metal plates bolted over what Cayden presumed were carved-on runes indicated that it was a higher level, able to withstand more than Cayden was able to dish out.

"My specialty is light," Velic began before conjuring a bright orb that hovered an inch above his outstretched hand, and Cayden lifted an arm to shade his eyes. "Most don't realize, but light can be extremely dangerous when used correctly. As it is, it can’t hurt a fly. But if I focus it correctly..." The sides of the orb that had been facing Cayden and his teammates turned dark while the side facing the dummy increased in brightness, the beam of light narrowing further and further until it illuminated only a single circle about the size of a quarter on the dummy's torso. "...and then if I make a few more adjustments..." Cayden wasn't sure what Velic was doing now, but the beam narrowed even further until it was only a tiny dot. Then, the color shifted from white to green, to yellow, to orange, before finally settling on red. For five seconds Velic held the red beam of light in place as a small trail of smoke rose from the illuminated point on the dummy, until he released it, leaving behind a tiny dot of charred wood. "I can project the source of the light from wherever I wish, but my aim gets worse if I do so." He gestured and a new orb appeared over his hand before floating to a corner of the room, releasing a red laser at the dummy in a fraction of the time it had taken for Velic to form the first laser. The aim, however, was off, hitting two inches to the right of his previous mark. "I can create up to three at once, but, once again, my aim is worse when I have more than one." Three orbs appeared before they simultaneously released red beams at the dummy, hitting it in a cluster around the initial center dot. "I can only attack in a straight line, so be aware of stepping between my orb and our opponents. It generally takes a second before it is able to burn anything, though, so if you're forced to step into the beam, I'll be able to deactivate my skill before you're seriously hurt."

Cayden absently nodded along to Velic's explanation, but most of his focus was spent trying to process the fact that his roommate had freakin' lasers as a skill.

How would he even go about getting offered that skill? Burning ants with a magnifying glass? Cayden didn't know much about lasers beyond what science fiction movies had taught him, but he knew they were complicated enough to be an advanced field of study in universities on Earth. How could someone in this low-tech world understand them enough to weaponize them?

"The biggest weakness my skill faces is fast-moving targets. If I can't focus the beam of light at a specific location for any length of time, most opponents will be unaffected. Which leads into Marvenal's skills."

Velic turned to his attendant and gave a nod, and Marvenal stepped forward to take Velic's place in the center of the room. "I slow things down," he said. Without wasting a second, he turned to the dummy and raised a hand, and a mass of black something shot out to envelop the training tool. From the way it impacted against the wood, Cayden would have expected to hear a splatter, yet the room remained completely silent. The black ooze clung to the wood in wet-looking strings, looking like a massive tangled black spider web.

Cayden gave Marvenal a questioning look, who gestured at the training dummy in clear invitation. Stepping forward, Cayden reached out and grabbed a glob of the black substance and attempted to pull it off, only for it to resist his attempt. It stretched and flexed in his grip, and when he attempted to release it, he realized it was stuck to his palm. He awkwardly pulled off his left claws' sheath with his teeth and tried to cut through the sticky substance. It worked – somewhat. He was able to slice through and disconnect his right hand from the dummy, but the web clung to his claws, now connecting Cayden's hands together with tangled black strings.

"Why didn't you use this in our test?" he asked, pulling against the substance until it finally peeled off of the claws on his left hand to swing limply below his right.

Marvenal made another gesture, and the web evaporated into nothingness, freeing Cayden and the dummy alike. "It's not great if others are near the target. I can't control it once it's out there, and I didn't want to tangle you up." He shrugged. "And you had it handled."

Begrudgingly, Cayden accepted the excuse. "Anything else?"

"It's weakened by heat and light, and I can make it disappear on command." Marvenal glanced at Velic before turning back to Cayden. "And I've got boosted perception and some stealth skills. Nothing else useful for battle, though."

Cayden nodded, then looked at Delphia before stepping forward. "I guess I'm next, then. Not that there's much to demonstrate – you've seen pretty much my whole kit. I'm durable and can [Taunt] enemies." He considered mentioning [Blade Sense], but ultimately decided against it. It wasn't a skill that would change his style of fighting beyond generally improving his capabilities, and there was a decent chance he'd lose it soon, anyway.

"Any weaknesses? Things you're more vulnerable to?"

Surprisingly, this question came from Delphia rather than Velic.

"No, I'm resistant to pretty much everything equally," Cayden had to contain his smirk after essentially reading his skill description aloud, with them none the wiser. He paused. "...actually, I'm better against physical attacks. I've got a skill that will alert me to mental attacks, and I'm hoping to upgrade that to something that'll help me resist them, but that's in the future."

Delphia's hood bobbed as she took a small step forward, suddenly seeming so much more confident. Smoky shadows swirled around her cloak as Cayden waited for her to explain her skills. Yet, instead, she stayed silent.

Until, without warning, she vanished.

Cayden looked back and forth around the room -- aside from Velic and Marvenal, the training dummy, and a few other miscellaneous pieces of training equipment, it was completely empty. How was that possible? He'd fought with rogues before, yet none of them had stealth skills that could make them completely disappear.

He continued to look around the room for his missing teammate, to no success, until he finally got the bright idea to check his other teammates. Following Marvenal's gaze, Cayden stared at what looked like an empty section of the room. Nothing stood out to him, but after checking to make sure that, indeed, that was where the rogue was looking, he squinted, staring harder.

And then, just as suddenly as she had disappeared, Delphia reappeared, about a foot to the right of where Cayden was searching.

"My stealth doesn't just make me hard to find. It...removes me from existence – partially." Her voice was quiet, but confident, and her back was straight beneath her cloak. "I become somewhat intangible and can pass through objects if they aren't too large. I can only stay in that state temporarily, though, and it becomes much weaker when under sunlight. I'm even more vulnerable to environmental effects like heat and cold when intangible as well. As for my healing...you've seen pretty much all there is to it. Touch-based, and I'm injured based on how severe the injury is that I'm healing. Healing potions are more effective on me and my potion limit is higher than normal, so it's almost always a net positive."

With the last words, she took a step back and her shoulders resumed their hunch.

"Well! I'm glad that we've all been able to trust each other," Velic said, once more taking command of the room. "And I believe we'll be better off for it. I've come up with a few strategies that will work well with what I saw in our test, and I should be able to modify them based on what I know now. But for now, how about we run through a few drills to get familiar with each other's tendencies?"

And with that, the training resumed.

--

Following the pattern his first few weeks had set, Cayden's life at the academy continued.

Every day he trained. In frontline combat with Jeremy, with his roommates or against Ignar, and alone, he spent more time training each day now than he had when living in Avernon – an impressive feat, considering how much time he spent in classrooms as well.

He started each morning in frontline combat, a nice warm-up for the day. Instructor Barry pushed and taught the students how better to protect their team and engage with monsters – traits that Cayden realized came naturally to him. [Taunt] coupled with his passive durability made Cayden an ideal frontliner: able to hold opponents' attention, take hits, and never be caught by surprise undefended. And the vitality training, vocally acknowledged by Jeremy and the rest of his class as the worst part of the academy, was nothing compared to what Elise had put him through to get [Resistance]. Especially since, between his passive [Resistance] and [Resilience], the heaviest-hitting vitality training aids struggled to seriously injure him.

Their training progressed in other ways as well. Instructor Barry gave them another shot at the assailants, this time allowing them to use active skills to defend themselves, and the rest of the class closed the gap on Cayden's lead. Yet none of them were able to catch him – in terms of durability, Cayden remained the unquestionable king of the class.

His time spent with Ignar remained an exercise in frustration. If it was previously next to impossible for Cayden to land a hit on his opponent, Ignar's new evasion skill he'd learned at the end of their first training session made it literally impossible. No longer did Ignar have to play it safe, dancing around Cayden with feints with his real blades, afraid to commit in case Cayden was able to grab his swords. Any time Cayden so much as grazed one of the noble boy's blades with something that might lead to a successful attack, Ignar would practically teleport across the training ring to a safe position. It was infuriating, and Cayden would be tempted to quit the training entirely if he weren't making such strides forward himself.

Between [Blade Sense] and constantly throwing himself against Ignar's impeccable sword skills, Cayden was growing in leaps and bounds in his fighting capabilities. Previously, he'd fought like a brute: tanking hits that he could have easily dodged and relying on his durability to charge in and overpower his opponent with his claws. But with hours of fighting against Ignar's shining [Echoed Blades], he was finally learning to fight more strategically.

Not that he stopped fighting like a brute. With his durability and skills, fighting like a brute was the best option he had. But he was fighting like a skilled brute.

No longer did he simply try to tank and dodge strikes at random. He learned to read his opponent and the trajectory of their weapon, weighing his options with experience. For those strikes he tanked, he learned how to best redirect the attacks so they caused minimal damage. For those he dodged, he grew more familiar with his body and its position in space, moving just enough to dodge the attack and no further. He learned how to better utilize [Inertia] in the heat of battle, lowering and increasing its value in a split second to catch his opponent by surprise with a quick acceleration or a heavier block. And he grew familiar with the flow of battle, sensing the opportunities for counterattack his opponent presented in the wake of his own strikes – never successfully, but Ingar was forced to use his new evasion skill more and more often.

He couldn't match Ignar's level of skill in battle. A few weeks of training wasn't enough to catch up to Ignar's years of tutelage under master swordsmen. But each time they trained together, the gap shrunk by just the slightest amount.

His time with his roommates, unfortunately, was less successful. Each day they spent at least an hour training together, save the weekends and the day they trained under Instructor Barry, whose lessons on teamwork were a surprising contrast to the brashness and intensity he displayed in the frontline combat classes. And though they grew more familiar with each other, they weren't anywhere close to approaching the level of synergy Cadyen had with Elise or even Jeremy. Despite their efforts, their skill sets never seemed to mesh, and they constantly got in each other's way. Cayden couldn't count the number of times he'd unintentionally gotten tangled up in Marvenal's web. He hoped it was only a matter of time, and they’d improve further by the end of the semester.

He also learned in his classes. Things he'd previously entrusted to Elise he had to now learn for himself. Things like the different types of dungeons and monsters, 'optimal' builds for adventurers, different types and variations on common skills – all of this and more he learned. He'd never been a great student in his previous life, but his increased mind stat, coupled with his own determination to succeed, made the lessons so much easier than the ones he remembered from a lifetime ago.

Of course, all the extra time spent in classes and training had to come from somewhere, and the area in which Cayden sacrificed was delves. He hadn't been on a delve since his outing with Jeremy, and he was missing it. There was something cathartic about clearing a dungeon that regular training couldn't replicate, although his duels with Ignar came close. But Cayden knew he was growing by leaps and bounds in his daily training, and he wouldn't sacrifice that if he didn't need to.

He would've been worried about his lack of income, but his first stipend from the academy had finally come through during his third week – and it was more than Cayden would've been able to make in a dozen delves around Avernon. He wasted no time trading the gold in for experience crystals and pushing his racial level up to fifteen, stockpiling the free stats from each level.

He met with Tiana two more times, each time in the market square on a Dyneday overseen by Valeria. Each time, he'd subtly questioned his sister on her safety and if her desire to escape had changed, each time getting the same response: she was doing fine, learning a lot, and there was no rush. Cayden wasn't entirely satisfied, but there was nothing he could do about it, and being able to catch up with his sister on a semi-weekly basis helped to alleviate some of his worries.

Lastly, Cayden spent time with Elise. Not nearly as much as he was used to, nor as much as he wanted to. Both of them were much busier than they had been in Valtane, he with his training and she with her studies, and couldn't waste away a full day walking to and from a dungeon in the Lost Forest. Yet Cayden still treasured the minutes they were able to spend together, times when Cayden could relax and recharge in their comfortable familiarity.

Elise had attempted to search for Valeria's recommended book, The Optimized Build, with no success. There was apparently only a single copy that was checked out of the library, and the librarians either didn't know or refused to share to who it might have been checked out. So Cayden was forced to wait on his new skill, which he found he didn't mind as much as he thought he would. Seeing Tiana the second time and realizing that she wasn't going anywhere had relieved some of the explosive pressure Cayden had felt to improve, and he had already gained so many different new skills recently. He was content taking some time to improve his control over and understanding of [Inertia], [Mind is a Temple], and [Blade Sense] before he learned something new.

Cayden lived his life as a student, growing and learning each day as the days turned to weeks and the weeks turned to months. And before he knew it, two months had passed, and it was time for his team's second test.

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