Growth
Deep in the mountains, the foliage had begun to trade its green for crimson.
Hop. Hop.
A rabbit darted busily this way and that, stockpiling food before winter sleep claimed it. Then, purely by chance, it stepped into human territory.
Clang!
A sharp ring slammed into its sensitive ears. The rabbit bolted into the undergrowth in pure terror. After a moment, curiosity got the better of it, and it poked its head cautiously back out of the grass.
Clang! Clang!
The same sharp sound came again, as if in warning. Thoroughly spooked, the rabbit decided it had done enough for the day and turned for home.
Whether the makers of that sound noticed or not, they kept right on producing it.
Clang! Clang! Skree! Clang!
"Hah!"
Clang!
Two blades met again with a shared shout of effort. Sparks of red light bloomed where steel kissed steel, but the weapons' owners paid them no mind, staring each other down with calm, settled eyes.
"When you're facing someone bigger and stronger than you—"
Robin, one of the two swordsmen, tightened his grip on the hilt with both hands and drove his body forward.
Whoosh!
In that same instant, the other swordsman—Jun—vanished.
"That's right. Don't fight the current. Evading is your best option. Hah!"
Clang! Clang!
Robin nodded in satisfaction, then spun the moment the words left his mouth and knocked aside the two flying blades that had been aiming for his back. He charged straight toward the direction they had come from—and there stood Jun, the one who had disappeared.
What now?
Watching Robin close the distance at speed, Jun ran through the possibilities. Himself holding a spear and keeping Robin at bay. Himself throwing daggers and widening the gap. Himself raising a shield and charging head-on.
The moment the best outcome crystallized among those imagined futures, he drew a weapon from subspace.
Whoosh!
A spear lanced through the air—a clean, economical thrust with nothing wasted. Robin twisted his mouth somewhere between pride and dismay and brought the sword he had held back into a guard across his front, ready to bat the spearpoint aside the instant it entered his defensive range. Dodging with his body would have been safer, but that would leave him helpless against the follow-up pressure that was sure to come.
Swish!
Monster brat.
Jun had read the intention early. Before Robin could even finish setting his deflection, the spearpoint driving for his chest bent on a bizarre new trajectory and dropped toward his lower body instead. Robin had no choice but to abort the charge and fling himself sideways out of the line of attack. He tried again to close, but every attempt dissolved under a string of precise, exquisitely timed successive strikes.
This is driving me insane.
It was stifling—as if every move he made was being read in advance. No: it almost certainly was. Spatial information-gathering paired with cognitive processing would make exactly that possible.
Robin's guess was dead on.
How will he answer this?
Through space, Jun harvested every scrap of data—Robin's micro-movements, his gaze, even the rhythm of his breathing—fed it all into the mannequin in his mind, and derived the predicted motion.
His body is angled a fraction to the left. Looks like he'll swing left and charge—but his center of gravity is already shifting right, so that's a feint. Real charge is seventy percent right, thirty percent straight ahead.
The instant Jun reached that conclusion, Robin moved. The body that seemed to be going left vanished from Jun's field of view in a single heartbeat. Used to this by now, Jun didn't panic; he simply leveled the spear to the right, exactly as space instructed.
"Tsk!"
Robin clicked his tongue and pulled back just as he was about to drive into the flank—or rather, he pretended to, then stepped into the Phantom Step he had used earlier and shot straight forward instead.
The spatial data had told Jun the man was about to retreat. He never saw the real charge coming.
"Ghk—!"
A blow landed clean in his gut.
"Jun!"
Fortuna, who had been watching the spar, cried out almost in a scream and flew to him. Eyes brimming, she yanked up his shirt. Across the firm abdominal muscles—harder than any child's had a right to be—ran a thin red line.
Great Heal
She pressed a hand glowing pure white to Jun's stomach, then rounded on Robin, who stood nearby looking blank, and shouted.
"How could you hit our Jun with something that vicious?!"
"…It's a blunt training weapon. And aren't you overreacting? Using high-tier holy magic on a bruise?"
"What?! A bruise?! You said just a bruise?!"
Fortuna lit into Robin with fire in her eyes; Robin, for his part, had no idea what to do with the scolding. Jun watched them through half-lidded eyes until the heat in his gut cooled a little, then finally reined Fortuna in.
"Fort, I'm fine. That's enough—just keep the healing hands going."
"Okay! Mama Fortuna's hands are magic hands. All of Juni's ouchies, go away~"
"Heh— ahem."
The soft tickle of her palm on his stomach nearly wrung an undignified sound out of him; he barely managed to swallow it behind a cough.
"Aww, come on. Make a happy noise. Hm? Hm?"
Unsatisfied, Fortuna started tickling his stomach in earnest. Jun dissolved into giggles and rolled across the ground. Their eyes met, and a moment later the two of them were locked in a tight hug, laughing as they tumbled over the dirt together.
Robin watched them with a faint, helpless smile, then hauled them upright once he judged they'd had enough. After that he pointed out the problems the spar had exposed.
"Jun. About reading things through space—"
"Just call it 'Radar.'"
"Radar? Fine, whatever. Don't put too much faith in that Radar. Like I just did, an enemy can turn even their own movements into a lie."
"Got it. But are there really that many people like that?"
"Clairvoyance, instinct, wave-sense—the methods differ, but people who predict an opponent's moves through some kind of ability the way you do aren't all that rare. Which means countermeasures for those abilities are pretty well developed, too."
"I see…"
The news that a weapon he had thought special was neither uncommon nor without counters left Jun disappointed. Robin clapped him on the shoulder in rough comfort.
"Don't look so down. You've got this to back the Radar up."
He tapped his own head with his free hand and went on.
"Learn. And think. Every counter an enemy might possibly use. Other people couldn't manage it—but you can, can't you?"
"…Yes, sir. I will."
Jun answered with energy. Robin smiled as if the boy were something precious, ruffled his hair, then cast a look around the training ground still marked by the spar.
"Three months. In a mere three months you've learned not one but all eight weapon arts, and you use them this fluently. If anyone else heard that, they'd tell you to stop lying so shamelessly."
"It's thanks to my cognitive superpower. It's not that my talent is anything special."
"A superpower is talent too. Stop trying to split them apart. Anyway—looks like we move to the next stage. I figured that alone would take a full year at least."
"That long?"
"Yeah. To start the next stage, you need to handle a weapon like an extension of your own limbs. For an ordinary person, getting a weapon to that level takes about a year. You see how abnormal you are?"
Jun nodded without argument. He wanted to say that, too, was thanks to his various abilities—but once Robin had declared those abilities talent as well, arguing the point would only make his mouth hurt.
"So what's the next training?"
"External reinforcement through Aura."
"Figured as much."
From the moment Robin had mentioned treating a weapon like a limb, Jun had roughly guessed what came next. He picked up the spear lying nearby, stowed it in subspace, and drew a small dagger into his hand instead. Robin likewise pulled the dagger from his belt and dropped into a seat in front of him.
"Reinforcing the body with Aura is called internal reinforcement. Reinforcing equipment with Aura is external reinforcement. Both are about strengthening something through Aura, but the difficulty gap between them is enormous. You know why?"
"Whether there's a mana circuit or not. Once you awaken an Aura Core, the mana circuits that form make circulating Aura inside the body easy—but equipment has no mana circuits, so circulating Aura through it is extremely hard. That's what I heard."
"Correct. There's also the nature of Aura itself. Unlike mana, which scatters easily and vents out of the body without much trouble, Aura has a property of clumping into a core, so it doesn't leave the body readily."
As soon as he finished speaking, Robin raised the dagger so Jun could see it clearly. At the same time—
Vmmm—
—the hum of a core engaging rose from the blade. The way the dagger's blue edge looked suddenly sharper was not pure imagination.
"That's why external reinforcement eats a monstrous amount of mental focus. You have to force Aura that doesn't want to leave out of the body, and you also have to gather it into a pseudo-core. Once the pseudo-core exists, maintaining it isn't that hard—but creating it is extremely difficult."
"How do you make a pseudo-core?"
"Compress Aura as tightly as you can at whatever point you judge to be the equipment's center, then spin it. The rotational force concentrates Aura's clumping property inward, and it binds itself. That mass is the pseudo-core. That's the whole method, so go ahead and tr—"
Vmmm—
"…You. You really are…"
What? Why? What!