Chapter 222: Training Montage [I / Bonus - ]
Silas let out a long sigh as he and Eluned stepped over the threshold with the heavy obsidian doors hissing shut and locking securely behind them.
"If you ever bothered to read the territory manifests I leave on the desk in my office instead of using the paper to clean your cutlass, Morwenna, you would have known it was down here..." Silas deadpanned, stretching his arms over his head until his shoulders popped.
"Reading is for bureaucrats and land-lubbers," Morwenna dismissed instantly with her eyes already gleaming with battle-lust as she paced across the stone tiles, testing their grip.
Silas ignored her, taking a deep breath of the crisp chilled air.
It was going to be an intense training montage today. He had six new elemental affinities waiting in his Lord inventory to be unlocked, but first, he had to satisfy the two strict taskmasters standing before him.
Eluned stepped close to his side, her pale hands reaching out to gently, affectionately take his right hand. Her emerald eyes looked up into his, overflowing with tender encouragement.
"You should not feel nervous, my Lord," Eluned told him softly, squeezing his calloused fingers. "The transition to Nature magic can feel foreign to a warrior accustomed to brute force, but I will be right here with you every step of the way... I will teach you as much as humanly possible, guiding your mana pathways until you become the absolute strongest you can be."
Silas smiled with a genuine warm emotion swelling in his chest.
Looking down at her beautiful, supportive face, he felt an overwhelming instinctive urge to pull his goddess close and press his lips to hers before the grueling work began.
He shifted his weight with his hand tightening around hers as he leaned his head down toward her lips—
WHACK!
A heavy projectile spun through the air and slammed violently against Silas’s bare chest, bouncing off his pectoral muscle with a sharp wooden crack.
Silas’s reflexes snapped into action.
His right hand released Eluned and shot out like a striking viper, snatching the spinning object out of the air mid-rebound before it could hit the floor.
He looked down at his hand.
It was a wooden practice sword. It was carved from heavy Ironwood which meant it was simply a training weapon designed to simulate the exact weight and balance of a true battle blade without the lethal cutting edge.
Silas lowered the wooden blade and looked across the arena.
Thirty yards away, Morwenna was standing with her feet planted wide, holding an identical Ironwood practice sword in her right hand.
Her feral gray eyes were narrowed into dangerous slits,and she was gritting her teeth so hard her jaw muscles bulged.
"Stop flirting!" Morwenna barked, pointing her wooden blade directly at his face. "This is a training room, not a honeymoon suite! And I already told you, weed... it doesn’t matter if he learned a few basic water tricks from some washed-up old crone in the desert! He doesn’t get to touch your nature spells until I sign off on his form!"
Morwenna dropped her center of gravity, shifting her weight into a flawless disciplined combat stance.
She raised the wooden blade, angling the tip exactly fifteen degrees to the right which was the universal unmistakable starting posture of her signature martial art.
"Come at me, Captain," Morwenna challenged him with her voice dropping into a thrilling bloodthirsty growl. "Show me the first style of the Tidal-Blade Arts that I taught you! Execute it cleanly against me right here, right now, or else I will not let you take a break by sitting around learning Nature magic!"
Silas grinned.
The warmth in his eyes vanished, instantly replaced by the golden-ringed focus of a predator entering the arena.
He let go of Eluned’s hand entirely, rolling his neck as he stepped forward onto the open stone tiles, leaving the nature goddess safely near the perimeter wards.
He gave the heavy Ironwood blade two rapid experimental practice swings with the dense wood whistling sharply as it cut through the chilled air.
"Alright," Silas agreed, settling into a loose athletic stance opposite his Pirate Queen.
He paused, tilting his head slightly. "Do we actually need to spar this time, Morwenna? Can’t I just execute the form against a target dummy?"
Silas was supremely confident in his ability to pull off the technique.
Ever since his Mythic Gold Core had stabilized his internal circulation, his understanding of fluid dynamics and leverage had skyrocketed.
The only reason he hadn’t spammed the technique continuously during the brutal meat grinder of the Secret Realm was simple efficiency... out in the desert, raw unga-bunga physical cleaves cost significantly less mental processing power than cycling heavy-water slashes while dodging glass artillery.
But he knew he had the mechanics locked down.
Morwenna didn’t even blink as her feral grin widened, displaying her sharp canines.
"Yes," Morwenna stated instantly, without a shred of hesitation. "In a full spar... A dummy doesn’t hit back, Captain. A dummy doesn’t test if your edge alignment holds when your wrists are vibrating from feedback so let’s see what you’re made of!"
The second the word left her mouth, the stone tile beneath Morwenna’s boots violently shattered.
BANG!
She didn’t give him a count of three and she didn’t wait for him to set his feet.
Morwenna exploded forward like a cannonball fired from a lower deck with her speed so terrifyingly unnatural that she left a vacuum wake in the chilled air of the vault.
She closed the thirty-yard gap in a fraction of a heartbeat, intent on taking her Lord completely off guard and putting him on the defensive before his mana could even cycle.
’Heh...’
She appeared directly inside his guard with her Ironwood blade sweeping upward in a vicious diagonal slash aimed straight for his collarbone, carrying enough raw physical force to decapitate a siege beast.
But Silas wasn’t the same green Lord who had stumbled through his first lessons in the mud.
His golden-ringed eyes tracked the blur of her shoulder as his right foot slid back two inches, anchoring into the runic stone, and he twisted his hips, bringing his own wooden blade down in a crushing timed parry.
CRACK!
The collision of the two Ironwood blades sounded like a thunderclap echoing inside a sealed cave.
Even without sharp edges, the force of their clashing strength created a visible, concussive shockwave that rippled outward across the arena, blowing the dust off the floorboards and making Eluned’s hair whip wildly around her face at the perimeter.
"My Lord..."
Silas successfully parried the diagonal trajectory, preventing the wooden blade from taking his head off but while his technique was flawless, Morwenna’s power as a fully realized combatant were still a terrifying mountain to overcome.
The overwhelming kinetic torque behind her swing overpowered his leverage.
"Guh!" Silas grunted as his boots were violently ripped from the floor.
He was sent flying backward through the air like a fired projectile, soaring across twenty yards of open space directly toward the towering runic stone wall of the vault.
As he tumbled backward through the air, Silas didn’t panic.
His mind remained icy cold.
’This is good too...’
Instead of flailing or bracing for a bone-crushing collision with his spine, he rapidly angled his torso mid-flight, tucking his knees toward his chest and spinning his body so that he faced the approaching vertical wall.
THUD!
His heavy combat boots slammed square against the vertical runic masonry.
The impact was brutal with the force traveling up his calves and thighs, but he actively used the natural shock-absorption of his muscled legs like coiled springs, compressing his knees to completely arrest his backward momentum.
In that exact split-second of contact, Silas aggressively pumped a massive surge of Gold Core mana directly into the soles of his boots.
The golden mana flashed, creating a pressurized adhesive grip against the stone.
Instead of pushing off or falling back to the floor below, Silas pushed his legs straight and started sprinting horizontally across the vertical wall!
He ran along the masonry with amazing speed, his black sweatpants whipping around his legs with his Ironwood blade held low and ready as he orbited the arena twenty feet above the ground.
Down on the floor, Morwenna spun on her heel, her gray eyes locking onto his high-speed wall-running trajectory with glee.
"Nice footwork, Captain!" Morwenna roared, her free left hand snapping out toward him with her fingers spread wide. "Let’s see how you handle a broadside!"
She didn’t cast a slow incantation as she simply tapped into her innate oceanic affinity.
’I’m proud of you...’
VWOOSH! VWOOSH! VWOOSH! VWOOSH!
In the span of two heartbeats, Morwenna aggressively blasted a rapid-fire barrage of condensed high-velocity balls of dark blue water directly from her open palm.
The water bullets were compressed to the point of behaving like solid iron cannonballs with each one screaming through the chilled air toward Silas’s airborne silhouette at high speeds.
Silas’s golden eyes widened.
He accelerated his sprint along the vertical wall, his boots leaving glowing golden footprints on the stone as he desperately outran the incoming artillery.
BOOM! CRASH! SHATTER! BOOM!
The high-velocity water balls slammed into the wall inches behind his trailing heels.
The concussive impacts were so devastating that they blasted massive three-foot-wide craters directly into the reinforced runic masonry.
Stone fragments and pulverized dust sprayed violently into the air as the wall shook from the bombardment.
As soon as the water cannonballs detonated, the defensive arrays woven deep into the Keep’s architecture flared with bright gold light.
The smoking craters left behind by Morwenna’s attacks immediately hissed with the broken stone granules actively pulling themselves back together and healing the structural damage in real-time.
But Silas didn’t wait around to admire the self-healing walls.
Seeing three more compressed water balls predicting his path directly ahead, Silas violently halted his sprint.
He compressed his legs against the masonry one final time and aggressively jumped completely off the wall, launching himself back out into the open center of the arena.
WHOOSH!
The explosive force of his launch was so astronomical that his boots left massive web-like spider-crack fractures spreading six feet wide across the vertical stone before the healing arrays could even begin to register the trauma.
He soared through the air, thirty feet above the arena floor with his body unsupported by gravity.
Down below, Morwenna’s eyes flashed red.
She tracked his airborne arc, her wooden sword lowering as she pulled back her left hand, gathering a massive swirling vortex of pressurized water in her palm that was three times larger than the previous projectiles.
"You’re completely open in the air, Captain!" Morwenna called out triumphantly, launching the massive water cannonball directly upward at his exposed midsection. "Take the hit!"
The massive sphere of dark blue water shot toward the ceiling like a rising meteor, entirely unavoidable.
Silas, suspended mid-air, didn’t flinch as a grin crossed his face.
’Open?’ Silas thought, his Gold Core roaring to life inside his chest. ’Not even close.’
Instead of trying to contort his body out of the path of the massive projectile, Silas aggressively extended his left hand downward, pointing his open palm directly at the incoming sphere of water.
He instantly seized uncompromising control over the spell itself!
Because he had spent days practicing under Mia and analyzing fluid dynamics, his Gold Core effortlessly invaded the structure of Morwenna’s spell.
In a single reality-defying second, Silas aggressively forced his mana into the liquid and triggered a instantaneous Ice Transformation!
KRACK-KRA-KRA-SHATTER!
The massive, rushing sphere of dark blue water violently froze solid mid-flight, instantly converting from liquid energy into an absolute-zero boulder of solid glacial ice mere yards below his boots!
And Silas didn’t stop there.
The exact moment the liquid solidified into ice, Silas aggressively manipulated the elemental properties of the mass, forcefully applying a gravity manipulation by increasing its density and weight tenfold!
The physics of the attack completely inverted.
Instead of continuing its upward trajectory to smash into Silas, the frozen glacial boulder suddenly became thousands of pounds heavier than its momentum could support as the momentum was instantly canceled out.
WHOOSH CRASH!
The massive ice boulder violently plummeted straight back downward toward the floor like a dropped anvil, completely missing Silas and crashing harmlessly onto the stone tiles below with a deafening shatter that sent fragments of ice flying across the arena.
A few smaller, stray secondary water bullets Morwenna had fired in tandem still shot past the falling ice, screaming toward his shoulders.
Silas smoothly twisted his torso mid-air, effortlessly dodging the stray projectiles by mere inches, letting the high-velocity water harmlessly part his damp dark hair.
As gravity finally reclaimed him, Silas descended rapidly toward the floor with his heavy Ironwood blade raised high above his head with both hands.
’Oh wow... Such quick thinking, it’s making me wet.’ Morwenna thought.
It had been a while since her Captain touched her and she craved for his touch, however she blinked, Morwenna didn’t retreat from the falling anvil or the descending Lord.
Her gray eyes lit up with pride and excitement at his elemental counter as she lifted their practice sword, planting her boots wide, and swung upward to meet his descent.
CLANG-CRACK-BZZZZZT!
They clashed once again in the dead center of the arena floor.