Dangerous New Technique
When Kael began pouring mana into the wooden sword, Derick had no expectations at all.
No matter how gifted a person was, there was no way to learn Aura overnight.
Even the Three Swords who guarded the Empire had needed a long time before they could master it.
And yet.
Aura…?
For a fleeting instant, the shape of Aura flickered over Kael’s wooden sword.
It was only for a moment, but Derick did not miss it.
Crack!
In the end, the wooden sword could not withstand Kael’s mana and shattered into pieces.
But Derick’s gaze was not on the broken sword. It was on Kael.
“H-How did you just use Aura…?”
“Pardon? Aura?”
“You just drew out Aura a moment ago!”
“I did?”
Kael tilted his head, looking genuinely baffled.
At that, Derick let out a short, incredulous laugh.
What a ridiculous talent.
Across the past and the future alike, would he ever see such talent again?
Probably not.
Kael was a monster with more talent than anyone Derick had ever seen.
And that makes it all the more frustrating.
If only Kael had not been blind.
There was no way to even imagine how far that brilliant talent might have taken him.
Swallowing his regret, Derick turned toward the armory at the edge of the training yard.
“Aura itself is already a formidable force. It isn’t something a wooden sword can possibly contain.”
From the armory, he took out a proper sword sized to Kael’s height and tossed it to him.
“Woah!”
Kael caught the blade.
Compared with the wooden sword, it was heavy enough to make him visibly surprise.
“Draw it.”
At Derick’s order, Kael slowly unsheathed the sword.
Ssrrring!
With a sharp metallic ring, the sun caught the blade and made it gleam as it emerged.
“Now pour your mana into the real sword the same way you did before.”
Kael did as he was told, drawing up the mana inside his body and channeling it into the sword.
Wooooong!
The blade gave a low hum and trembled faintly.
Then.
Swoosh…
A pale blue film slowly spread across the sword’s surface.
It was crude, hazy, and unstable enough to seem as though it would scatter at any second, but—
“Aura…!”
It was unmistakably Aura.
“Heh.”
Derick gave a dry laugh.
He could no longer tell whether the scene before his eyes was a dream or reality.
That was how immense the shock Kael had delivered was.
“You’re a monster through and through.”
“That much, huh?”
At Kael’s innocent question, Derick answered honestly.
“I once said your talent could be compared to the Three Swords. I take that back. Your talent has already surpassed even them.”
“Then do you think I can beat Hate?”
“If only you had time.”
Kael’s talent was enough.
No, more than enough—it overflowed.
But the time allotted to him was far too short.
Only a few days remained before the duel.
With the crude Aura he had now, there was nothing he could do against Hate.
Derick fell into thought for a moment.
It’s not that there’s no way.
If Kael had not learned Aura yet, he might not have considered it. But now that it had been confirmed Kael could handle Aura, there was exactly one method they could try.
But that method was far too dangerous.
One wrong step, and Kael could lose his life. Even if he survived, he might spend the rest of his days crippled.
Derick closed his eyes.
He worried, but the choice was not his to make.
Whether Kael walked that path or not was for Kael alone to decide.
After a moment, having made up his mind, Derick spoke.
“There is one way. One way for you to land a blow on Hate before the duel.”
He paused briefly, then continued in a low voice.
“But you’ll have to stake your life on it.”
“……”
“Even so, will you do it?”
Kael answered without hesitation.
“Might as well give it a shot.”
***
After hearing the method from Derick—one that might cost me my life—I shouted in disbelief.
“So you’re saying I should deliberately overload my mana to boost Aura’s power? How is that supposed to make sense?”
“It’s madness. Something no one should ever do. But the power is real.”
Normally, knights stored mana in a place below the navel called the dantian.
Only the mana stored in the dantian could be refined into Aura.
To put it simply, if mana was iron ore, then the dantian was the furnace that melted it down.
Just as a blacksmith melted iron in a furnace to forge a sword, a knight refined mana in the dantian to create his own Aura.
Mages, on the other hand, stored mana in the heart.
Unlike knights, mages did not refine mana.
They twisted the laws of nature with mana in its raw state and made miracles happen. That was magic.
In other words, knights and mages used the same mana, but the way they handled it was entirely different.
So what would happen if both powers were used at the same time?
“Pure mana that hasn’t been refined at all. If you pour that directly into the sword, the Aura becomes endlessly unstable. Like a bomb on the verge of exploding.”
As if to demonstrate, Derick drew Aura around his sword.
Wooooong!
Unlike mine, it was neither crude nor hazy, but perfectly formed Aura.
“This is a normal Aura sword. If I feed even a tiny amount of unrefined mana into this….”
The instant Derick poured unrefined mana into the Aura—
Zzzzzzt!
“Ghk!”
The Aura surged violently and let out a screeching, ear-splitting roar.
The Aura that had been steadily wrapping the blade was long gone.
What replaced it was only a violently distorted mass of mana that looked ready to burst at any second.
“Ugh….”
Something was running down the corner of Derick’s mouth.
Because it was daytime and his vision was sealed, the world looked like a monochrome hologram, so I couldn’t tell the color. But I knew it was blood.
He had suffered internal injuries from merely feeding a little unrefined mana into the Aura.
Wincing through the pain, Derick swung the sword.
It cut through the straw dummy standing in the training yard.
No—rather than cut it, it blew it apart.
Kwaaaang!
With a deafening roar, dust scattered in every direction.
And when the dust cleared, what remained of the training yard was shocking.
The straw dummy had vanished without a trace, and the ground behind it was gouged out as if a bomb had exploded there.
It was hard to believe that had all come from a single swing of a sword.
“Huff, huff.”
After doing that, Derick was breathing so hard he looked as though he might collapse at any moment.
Then he looked at me and said, “You can’t see it, but I just cut through the straw dummy and tore up the training yard floor behind it. That’s not something a normal Aura sword could ever do.”
He caught his breath for a moment, then continued.
“As you can see, simply pouring unrefined mana into an Aura sword multiplies its power several times over. But in exchange, the Aura becomes a bomb that could go off at any moment, and the user suffers severe internal damage as well.”
With that, Derick wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth.
He had only demonstrated by feeding in a tiny amount of unrefined mana, and even then it had injured him internally.
Just imagining what would happen if he actually stuffed that technique full of unrefined mana was enough to make my skin crawl.
Still, I’ve got to do it.
Hate was by no means an easy opponent.
If I wanted to beat him, I had to be ready to accept this level of gambling.
Trying to defeat him without risking even this much would go beyond greed and straight into arrogance.
“Now I’ll tell you how to do it.”
Derick sheathed his sword and walked toward me.
“Aura can be drawn from the dantian, but unrefined mana has to be stored separately in the heart. That’s called a Core.”
“Core….”
“At a glance, it might seem similar to a mage’s circle, but it’s better to think of it as a completely different concept.”
If a mage’s circle formed a ring of mana around the heart, then the Core Derick spoke of was a condensed clump of mana stored near the heart itself.
“What I just showed you was the result of consuming a single Core. The more Cores you consume, the greater the power, but the greater the risk as well.”
Just one.
It was astonishing that one alone could produce that kind of power.
“How many Cores can you make?”
“That depends on the individual. The one who handled the most Cores in history is said to have used as many as ten. For reference, my limit is four.”
I roughly understood what a Core was now.
I sat down in a cross-legged position on the training yard floor.
“Guide the mana toward your heart. Then condense it.”
Following Derick’s instruction, I breathed as if drawing the mana drifting through the air into my heart.
Wooooong!
With a ticklish sensation, I felt mana gathering near my heart.
I slowly compressed it, as though pressing it into a single mass.
Before long, the condensed mana took up position beside my heart and began to revolve slowly, like a satellite orbiting a planet.
Core (1-Star)