Chapter 18

Belief is formative to magic but even as all of reality opens itself like a book to you, and everything becomes possible, so too do limitations become apparent. Without limitations, each mage to ascend would become unto a god, remaking all of creation to their whims. There are fundamental rules of magic which can be bent, but never broken. There are fundamental laws of the universe that cannot be ignored if one wishes to perform magic. The first of those laws is this. Do as you will.

—Fundamentals of Arcana, Albrecht Magnus

Chul was waiting outside the door to Sylvas room when he got back, not as though she had just knocked, but as though she was waiting for the allotted time to knock. Did she just not sleep?

“Good morning.” Sylvas called out to her, in spite of the fact that it clearly wasn’t going to be, given he hadn’t seen the inside of his bed yet.

“Up early.” Was the only response he got. More than he’d expected but less than a useful segue into actual conversation.

“It’s a busy time.” He managed a smile, but she didn’t seem to care if he was happy, sad or on fire, so long as he was there on time.

The routine wasn’t much changed from any other day, except that Sylvas had the added queasiness that only reversing the flow of mana in his body could bring. He hadn’t even noticed at first, but his circles switched the direction of their rotation each time that he went from casting to drawing mana. It explained why he had such disorientation. Three fundamental components of his being were being flipped back and forth each time. Doing it while exercising actually proved to be quite challenging, but also useful. If he could lift weights and run while using his new technique, then he could do anything.

He put his distraction down to that queasiness when he didn’t notice Chul dragging equipment out onto the sand. Something that looked like a punching bag but isolated inside a portable magic circle and hovering in mid-air without assistance. A couple of other pieces of machinery that seemed similar. When he finally did notice the presence of the equipment, it was only because he felt a change in the air as Vaelith teleported into sight.

She was in good humor that morning. “Heel, boy.”

Sylvas chuckled as he set the blocks of ancient bricks down carefully. “Testing time.”

“You’re scrying me again?”

“Better.” She spun on her heel and delivered a kick to the hovering bag that knocked it clean out of its position in the center of the circle, bouncing it back and forth and all over the place for a moment before it wobbled to a halt and an illusion manifested on the outside of the circle reading, “A10.”

“I’m not sure what the point of this is.” Sylvas approached the bag cautiously. “What does it tell you that scrying doesn’t?”

Vaelith gave the closest thing to a smile Sylvas had ever seen her offer up. “It tells us how hard you can hit before you break your own arm. Now hit it.”

To his credit, he did swing for the bag with all his strength, and though it didn’t bounce around the way that it had for Vaelith, it did at least rock back and forth in its position before announcing “F2.”

Chul sighed, and Sylvas felt the need to defend himself. “It’s only been a few days.”

“Next time, really hit it.” Was all she said back.

He steadied his position, following the proscribed hand-to-hand combat manual to the letter, and then delivered another pathetic F2 punch.

It was Vaelith’s turn to look irritable. “Use your embodiment.”

“It breaks my bones.” Sylvas felt oddly proud of himself for standing up to her, given that just a couple of days ago she’d proven how easily she could beat him to death. He reached for the crest on his chest nervously. She’d pinned it back on him after the need to make him fear death had passed. This was one hell of a school.

“Incremental increases.” She demanded and faced with the choice of failing her or keeping his bones intact, Sylvas made the safer choice. He drew back his fist, increased its weight, and swung.

The panel read: “F7.”

The bag took a full second to swing back into its natural position after that one. A solid hit, if he was any sort of judge.

“Harder.” Vaelith had dropped into a squat with her heels tucked under her, waiting and watching, Chul was leaning on a broken down bit of wall that seemed to be crumbling under the weight. Neither of them looked too concerned about his wellbeing.

He swung his fist back and forward again, reducing the weight of the blow while he drew back and then increasing it rapidly as he drove it into the bag.

“F9”

“Come on!” Vaelith was back on her feet, crowding in at him. “Hit it like you mean it.”

The best way to increase the weight of his blows was to create as large a swing between the extremes of weight as he threw the punch, but the faster he warped himself the less time his body had to adjust and the more likely it was that he was going to come apart.

“E2”

His arm ached as it dropped back to his side, and he didn’t need the medic there to tell him that the micro-fractures in his bones were back. “That was too much.”

Vaelith was casting, the language of it unfamiliar, words Sylvas had never encountered in any of the spells that he’d studied. Pain shot through his arm much more sharply this time, like ice crackling up the length of it. When it faded, the worst of the damage to his bones seemed to have eased. She nodded back to the bag. “Aim for F15.”

He did as she asked, and again, it felt like he’d broken every bone in his arm when it made contact with the bag. He said a word in his native tongue that he was happy couldn’t be translated.

Vaelith stepped in to cast her brutal healing spell again. “F14.”

“You do understand that this is painful?” Sylvas grunted as the shards of ice knitted his bones again.

There was no sympathy. “Need to know your limits.”

From the beginning, the Ardent had pushed him to the point of self-destruction over and over again to try and make him as powerful as he could be. Hammerheart had been an excellent excuse for him to throw himself into it, to treat every interaction as though it were life and death, but without that persistent threat, Sylvas now found he was seeing through the thin layer of deception. Even when he was a beacon of excellence, they had continued moving the goal-posts to make it impossible for him to win. Because they feared that he’d become complacent, they feared that all of his potential would go to waste. They had no trust in his own desire to advance, to become as powerful as he could be, to do exactly what he had set out to do from the beginning and fight back against the Eidolons and whoever was behind their summoning. Trust was a two-way street, and they had broken his.

“This is my limit.” He told her, crossing his aching arms. “I can hit F10.”

“We already know that you can hit F10,” Vaelith seemed to forget that she was talking to a recruit with a brain. “We’re trying to reach the upper limit before you break.”

“You already broke me, remember.” He snapped back. 

It may have been for his own good, but Sylvas couldn’t shake the thought that even if it hadn’t been, she would have gone through with it anyway. She didn’t care about his sleepless nights, she didn’t care about how much it hurt him to think about the home he’d destroyed, she only cared about making him into the best weapon she could. She was a smith as surely as Sagran, but the components that she was hammering into dangerous shapes were people.

There was no frown on her face, no sign that he’d offended her, but the disappointment radiated off her all the same.

“Attempt F11.” She ordered. 

Sylvas didn’t want to. He had told her that he was done. That he wasn’t going to go on hurting himself over and over, just so she could mark numbers up on a slate. His job was not to be tortured endlessly. He was here to be a soldier, a mage, one of the Ardent. Not a victim.

But despite himself, Sylvas moved to obey. It was all very well drawing a line in the sand and saying that he wasn’t going to be ordered to hurt himself any more, but unfortunately, he wanted to know just how far he could go too. At least she’d made the concession of starting at lower intensity and working up instead of making him shatter his arm again and again.

F11 was soon followed by F12. By the time that they reached F13 he could feel the strain, more in his joints than in the bones themselves. A warning that anything more would do damage. Even at F12, there had been a persistent ache and a prickling staticky sensation in his hands. “That’s the limit.”

“Let’s aim for F15 by the end of the week.”

Chul grunted. “That’s two days?”

Vaelith glanced over at the fiend imperiously.

Chul shrugged. “Two ranks, two days.”

Sylvas looked between the two of them as if they were mad. Even if he was allowed two weeks, that kind of rapid growth was unlikely.

Still, the workout that he went through over the course of the rest of the morning was a definite step in the right direction. Where before they’d been running and lifting, with these testing apparatus, Sylvas was able to work on every different group of muscles in his body, not only working out how to use the resistance they offered him to strengthen himself, but also how to enhance his strength with his embodiment. Now that he knew that he could consistently swing an F12 punch, he proceeded to work out how to shift weight around to make kicks, jumps, and all of the other motions that these machines mimicked just as effective. For some it was counterintuitive, and he was having more of an effect without his embodiment by just bearing down. For others, the only way that he made any headway at all was by flinging the internal gravity of his body up and down. Sometimes he swung too hard, and it hurt, sometimes he needed to put in more force than he had for his punches. It varied so much that without Lockmind, he likely would have forgotten half of it before the training session was done. 

He couldn’t say exactly at what point during his exercises that Vaelith had left, but the lingering air of annoyance remained. It wasn’t coming from Chul who was as belligerently good natured as always, and Vaelith hadn’t left behind an illusory copy of herself to scowl, which left Sylvas with the inevitable conclusion that he was the one getting annoyed with himself. If nothing else, it helped to drive him on to greater feats of athleticism.