Stronger Together chapter 216

The next few weeks flew by, constant training and unrelenting  beatings for everyone. Well, everyone in my team, so just Yang and I.  But still it was a rough few weeks. The stupid training room updated as  we fought our copies forcing us to find new and creative ways to exploit  our weaknesses. Which I knew was the point but it didn't make  discovering a hole in my opponents guard and then exploiting it only to  have it vanish next time less annoying. Granted it only vanished because  I had fixed it in my own style but still, pushing boulders up hill.

Yang  was having much more luck fortunately. After watching my construct do  his thing she had spent hours making me repeat the sequence, trying to  capture the essence of the fighting style before finally having me stand  back while she fought herself again. She won the first match in a few  minutes because we forgot to recalibrate the room after her improvement  but the second battle was much better. Then she had me make the  construct again rinsing and repeating until she was sure she had it  committed to memory.

After our weeks of training were up  we fought against each other once again, to test our improvement. Yang  held me off much longer this time, but I ended up winning in the end.  Despite her impressive growth between my brain being able to retain  everything and my constant refining of the foundation klurkor gave me my  defense had become pretty much unbreakable, especially with an arm made  indestructible divine metal. Still, it was damn near impossible to  avoid her hits and I had to weather them as they came.

We  had originally been going to do a battle at the end of every week to  reset the room but once we found out it updated as we fought our copies  there had been no need, and the extra two weeks had given us a ton of  time to refine ourselves. You never see your flaws as clearly as when  you have to look for them in order to not get your skull caved in, Yang  wanted to keep going on our physical training after that, and it was  hard to blame her, we had come such a long way. But in the end neither  of us were a purely physical fighters, which I reminded her of.

I  think if she hadn't been at least partially worried about letting Harry  down she might have pushed anyway, but once I convinced her we agreed  to at least take the rest of the day off to rest and get into peak  fighting shape. Even though the food helped with the aches and pains,  the fight with Yang hadn't been an illusion after all. I'd actually  taken and dealt damage, and while I wasn't aiming to kill or anything  holding back in a spar against someone that strong isn't exactly an  option. And so we got some sleep, and the next day found us meeting back  down in the training room for a completely different reason.

Despite  having wanted to switch to physical only, Yang seemed energized by the  change to magic practice, and I couldn't say I didn't agree with her.  I'd been looking forward to this. If Yang could teach me some of her  earth magic I could maybe get a whole new aspect. My aspects were hands  down my most effective tool, since they scaled in power alongside my  body and the godsteel network inside of it. Even without the metal veins  I suspected they would grow in power over time, but my second  circulatory system made a huge difference.

She  faced me seriously, but still with a grin on her face, eyes shining  with glee. "So stud, what do we start with first? I know you don't know  earth magic, and I'd love to pick up that lightning stuff you do. You're  even better at those kinds of spells than Harry is." Which was true.  More than a year with my lightning aspect as my primary and refining my  first spell had given me a strong grasp on lightning magic. My boss  never used the stuff, he preferred fire and force. Lightning was too  indiscriminate for him.

Which  was fair honestly, I used the stuff mainly as a buff for myself, and  even when I attacked I tended to channel it into my arm and punch with  it. I shrugged. "Whichever is fine, I admit I'm pretty psyched to learn  that earth spell. I know you picked it up because you wanted to combine  it with your fire magic and learn Harry's volcanomancy skills. Do you  have enough power to pull that one off after all the refining since we  got here?" I wasn't sure if the spell would even work since we weren't  even on earth anymore, but the idea of a soulfire volcano was just so  damn cool.

She  grinned. "I should yeah. I haven't tried it since we've been in the  city but my Aura is much bigger than it used to be. It's not growing at  your speeds since without the godsteel in your body a normal person  can't use that weird burning klurkor cycle you tap into, but as my body  has been getting stronger I've noticed a marked increase in my speed of  growth. It just wasn't something we saw before because such a small  percentage of the process was done." That was good to know. My own Aura  reserves were massive at this point, but I knew my godsteel had  something to do with that.

I  returned the fierce smile gesturing at the room. "By all means then,  you can go first. Don't do the volcano spell in here but I'm curious  what kind of earth magic you can manage." Thinking about it logically  she should be able to do earth magic here, even if we weren't on earth,  there was actual stone and rock beneath our feet. But just in case it  mattered I didn't mention the possibility, more than one wizard had  pulled off a spell because they didn't know they couldn't. I stepped to  the edge of the room to let her work.

Yang  got a focused look as she stared at the middle of the room. The floor  in here was wrecked. The owners had stopped repairing it after the first  week since we destroyed the mat and the stone every single day anyway. I  had a feeling todays mess would be worse than usual. I opened my magic  eye, casting the spell I was so familiar with as easily as breathing. I  watched the magic in the air, dense enough that there was a cloud of it  hanging around us even when we weren't using the stuff, to see how she  formed the spell.

As  Harry mentioned in the books the gathering of earth magic moved slowly.  Whereas fire magic used energy to create vibrations to create heat, the  process of earth magic required a bit more input than most forms of  evocation. Harry had been studying with Henry for a while and learned  his trade well, and he'd passed that on to Yang, but she was still new  at this so her control wasn't great. She dumped massive amounts of magic  into the rock beneath the floor and thenstarted pulling the magic back  in like a trawling net.

She  seemed to be harvesting the native energy in the stone and condensing  it into a smaller area so she could manipulate it more easily. I knew  Henry could tap into that small amount of energy present in even normal  rock and twist it to his will, but Yang was condensing some kind  of...innate power into a more limited area to make more significant and  powerful rock for her to mold. I also knew from various things I'd heard  from the older wizards that the ability to manipulate and condense that  earth energy came with practice, hence Yang needing to shove in way too  much power.

It  was a complicated seeming spell, mostly because the energy inherent in  the rock both was and wasn't magic. The spell was being used to interact  the with natural essence in the earth itself. Henry's ability to  interact directly was the next best thing to earth bending and one of  the things that made him such a terrifying earth mage. He'd learned most  of his skills from Calliope. It was also why in the books Harry  mentioned how slow earth magic moves. Interestingly Yang was better just  starting out than Harry was in the books I believe, with Henry to teach  him this version of Harry was much more skilled.

Yang  finally gathered enough power in the earth she was working with to  begin shaping the stone of the floor. Unlike canon Harry's earth magic  which he just locked and loaded, with Henry's help he'd been able to  refine the spell to actively shape the rock albeit still incredibly  slowly. I could see the strain on her face as she moved the rock,  shaping and shifting it as it flowed up from the floor like wax melting  in reverse. Henry's more advanced method obviously wasn't without cost  as I could see Yang's immense difficulty as she forced the magic to  work.

Yang  stepped back panting from a rough statue of a what looked like a poorly  sculpted person. She shot me a cheeky grin. "See! Easy as pie. Now did  you get that or do I have to go through this step by step?" Her tone was  cheerfully mocking, but she knew I'd seem how it worked well enough to  try it myself. I knew the basic theory already from talking to the older  wizards and now that I had a direction to go in I was sure I could pull  the spell off myself. I flipped Yang off and helped her to the table  with the snacks, letting her eat and refuel a bit before I started.

Once  that was done I closed my eyes with a long exhalation and reach for my  magic. This was a difficult sort of thing for me to do, controlling my  magic and using it in a different way, just like I'd had problems with  the wind magic when I'd tried to learn. Luckily I had an advantage this  time. One of my arms was metal, which came from the earth, and knowing  how to shape my magic into metal gave me a starting point for earth  magic, even if it wasn't a perfect fit. I pushed the magic out into the  ground around me, feeling for the essence in the rock.

I  could see why Yang needed so much. Touching the essence was damn near  impossible. I basically needed to flood the stone with so much power  that the essence got dragged along incidentally, and I clearly didn't  have Yang's practice because I had to put easily ten times the magic  into the rock before the essence would even move. I could see how this  would allow me to learn to come in contact with the essence eventually,  but it was going to be a long slow road. Still I dragged the power back  concentrating the essence into the stone until there was enough that  even I could mold it.

The  inexplicable power became easier to work as it became denser, until  finally I managed to drag enough essence in to shape it. Sadly even with  all the power I used I'd only managed to get about a square foot of  usable rock out of it and molding it was exhausting and time consuming,  but still I pushed on, until I was left panting and wheezing in front of  a small stone copy of my cat. Max looked up at me with his curious  soulful eyes and I grinned to myself looking at an impressed Yang in  triumph. She grinned back and helped me to the table as I had for her.  Then I are, and we got back to work. We had plenty of training left to  do.