The hardest part about this was that he had to contort his body in just the right motions, on top of matching the timing.
Vir lunged into the gauntlet, ducking a blade that grazed his head, whisking his black hair.
He wrenched his body through the gap between two rotating posts before jumping, bringing his knees to his chest to avoid two more blades. He didn’t land on both legs, though—that would lead to him taking a sword in his left shin. Instead, Vir hopped on his right leg, narrowly dodging another blade.
Too slow!
After enduring this gauntlet endless times, Vir had developed an innate sense of the correct pace, and he was lagging. If he didn’t want to be mulched by the wooden blades, he needed to do something, now.
His muscles protested as he forced his body to hasten, injecting more power into his lunges, dodges, and jumps. Through sheer willpower, he managed to regain the timing… Barely.
Vir wasn’t out of the woods yet. The final hurdle of this obstacle lay before him: a series of three more posts. Two on the right, and one on the left. The timing of this last hurdle was especially brutal.
It’d taken Vir innumerable repetitions and hours of staring at the posts to realize the trick: the timing changed every four rotations. Which meant that there was no safe path through half the time. He called them pattern A and pattern B.
This course told him more about the inner workings of Riyan’s mind than anything else the man had ever said or done—only a sadist would come up with such a convoluted contraption.
The worst part was how he had to enter the previous set of rotating posts based on the timing of the final set. If he started the course during pattern B, he was doomed to fail no matter how perfectly he executed his moves.
After endless attempts, he’d learned. Painfully and brutally, he had mastered the timing. And even then, his breakthrough only came thanks to Prana Vision. The prana coursing through the inscriptions on the cylinders changed slightly an instant before the pattern shifted, giving Vir a precious indicator to watch for.
Vir ducked and jumped, clearing the obstacle, and landing on a ladder that led to the third platform. He’d hoped he could rest on the ladder, but it was within the range of the rotating posts. There would be no rest here.
He scrambled up it as fast he could manage. It wasn’t enough. One blade nicked his Achilles tendon, making him wince.
He gingerly stood atop the highest platform he’d ever gotten to.
The third challenge that awaited him was a series of enormous, swinging wooden scythes suspended from a horizontal log above. Although, ordinary scythes would be too easy. No, these scythes’ motions were erratic and unpredictable. They didn’t swing in arcs. They sped up, slowed down, stopped, jerked, and reversed.
This, too, was a trial of memorization, and Vir felt like he was finally beginning to grasp the feel of it.
The moment he stepped off the ladder, he was already in the path of the first scythe. Vir ignored the pain from his foot and jumped into its arc, knowing it would stop midair.
It did, for a split second, which was all the opportunity he needed to leap past it. The issue with this obstacle, like the one before it, was that the moment he passed the first hazard, he was immediately thrust upon the next one. There were no breaks, no opportunities to pause and reevaluate the situation.
Every self-preservation instinct he possessed screamed for him to move! To get out of the way of the scythe that swung for his head. But he resisted. The scythe would stop in its tracks and turn back around. He had to trust his analysis, because if he moved now, he’d walk right into the next scythe in line.
The scythe stopped as predicted, and Vir let out a deep breath. Only, instead of turning around like it had when he’d observed it from the ground, it continued its arc, crashing into his ribs and sending him flying off the platform.
Vir screamed as he sailed through the air and tumbled toward the sand below.
His instincts took over, and he automatically threw himself into a roll to soften the impact, but the third obstacle was higher than the rest. Even with the deep sand, the impact hurt.
“Grah!” he roared, punching the sand.
He was sick of this. Sick of being clubbed by wooden weapons. Sick of the scrapes when he fell onto the sand.
Vir took one look at the obstacle course and abandoned any thought of attempting it again that day. He was done.
There had to be something he could do to give him an edge. He sat and closed his eyes, focusing on his prana despite the pain that throbbed from his stomach.
These meditation sessions were all that had kept him from suffocating under the immense pressure of their training regimen. The only thing that kept him sane. And it was while meditating that he’d had a breakthrough. Black prana coursed through his body, and after hours of meditation, Vir began to feel the circulating prana, to an extent. It was an incredibly faint sensation, which was why he’d never noticed it before. With practice, this sense grew stronger and stronger. And with it came a realization.
He’d initially thought Prana Vision required his blood to operate.
That was wrong. It powered off of his prana, not his blood.
Though obvious in hindsight, the realization was subtle, yet profound. As far as he could tell, prana flow was synonymous with blood flow. Rather, it appeared as if his blood actually carried his prana. He confirmed this by observing the flow of prana within Maiya and Riyan. Both behaved identically to his own body.
Which meant two things. First, his body’s prana flow functioned the same as everyone else’s, just that his particular affinity was unknown to everyone and wasn’t present anywhere in nature. Secondly—and this was what made him giddy with excitement—whatever affinity he had was powering Prana Vision.
It meant he could use magic! In fact, he’d been using magic all this time. But that only gave him more questions. Magic required orbs to use. Everyone knew that. Riyan himself said the amount of prana within the body was insignificant—that mejai channeled prana from the surrounding air to fuel their orbs. Yet Vir could use magic without orbs. And the prana within his body seemed sufficient to power his Prana Vision…
There was something else, too. He’d missed it earlier, but now that Prana Vision had become more sensitive, he noticed that the prana in his body continuously ‘leaked’ out into the air and ground.
This happened at all times, regardless of what he was doing, and it leaked faster when he exerted himself. Just to be sure, he confirmed that the same phenomenon never happened to Maiya or Riyan, so it was unique to him.
He didn’t quite know what to make of that yet. The biggest question mark in his mind was whether his prana was only good for Prana Vision, or whether it could be made to serve other purposes. He truly hoped it could, but thus far, he’d been unsuccessful in manifesting any other powers.
“So? How far didja get this time?” Maiya asked, walking into the training dome.
Vir heard her stop on the edge of the sand, several paces away. He kept his eyes closed, concentrating on his meditation.
“Second scythe. Same as last time.”
“Still, I can’t believe you’ve gotten this good this fast.” Maiya hadn’t been able to make it past the balancing beams—the easiest obstacle of them all.
Vir shook his head with his eyes still closed. “I wish. But I guess all those years of jumping through Brij’s alleys helps out. Anyway, I think I know what’s going on now. The scythe’s behavior changes depending on whether there’s a person in the course or not.”