“Thank you.”
“Get your transference sword, I have an idea.”
I went and retrieved the sword, setting Selys-Lyann down nearby.
“Toss it here for a second.
I threw him the sword.
Keras drew the blade, glancing it over. “Good balance. But more importantly, the aura should work for our purposes.”
He sheathed it and tossed it back to me. I caught it without difficulty.
Keras drew a training sword. He always left his other sword — the one with the silvery aura he’d used against Katashi — in his scabbard.
“The foundation of most of my sword techniques is the manipulation of my aura. I use it in a variety of ways, the most basic of which is simply reshaping my aura into a cutting field, like what I taught Marissa.”
I nodded. “But I can’t do that, since I can’t manipulate my shroud yet.”
“Right. But you can manipulate the aura of an existing magical weapon. I’ve seen you do it. You’ve got a technique similar to my cutting wave. The one where you swing it, and you project a wave of force.”
“Sure. I just push some transference mana through my hand, which reacts with the aura around my sword and pushes the sword’s aura outward.”
He shook his head. “I think you’re doing a little more than that, even if it’s not conscious. If it was just making two auras collide, your blade’s aura would shift, but it wouldn’t fly outward in a crescent shape like that.”
That…made a degree of sense, but I didn’t think I was doing anything else.
Keras swung the practice sword in the air, and a wave of energy rippled outward. “When I cut the air like that, I’m not just slamming my aura into something and hoping it’ll go the right way. I’m shaping my aura into a blade and projecting it in the direction I’m thinking about. My intent determines the dimensions of the shockwave and the direction it goes.”
“And you think I’m doing the same thing, subconsciously?”
“Right. Which means that you have the ability to shape transference mana, at least to a limited degree.”
I frowned at that. “I have to be able to manipulate mana to force it outward, but only when I’m physically touching it. I had a little stronger sense for mana while I was inside the spire — the air was so thick with it that I could move the ambient mana just a little. But…” I drew the sword, inspecting the aura. “I don’t think I can do anything with this aura. Not without cutting my fingers off, anyway.”
“Well, figuring out how to protect yourself from your own weapon’s aura would be a good training exercise. But for the moment, I think I have a theory on how you’re doing what you’re doing.
“The first type of thing I learned to shape was metal, and at first, I couldn’t shape it unless I was touching it. The way I learned to work around that was to use a piece of metal — like a sword — to touch whatever I wanted to shape. That made a sufficient connection for me to manipulate the target.”
I pondered that. “You think that, in the instant my transference mana is touching the aura of the blade, I have enough of a connection to shape the blade’s aura?”
“Exactly.”
“Huh.” If that was true, how could I use that? Would that be applicable to other types of mana as well? Could I figure out how to reshape other forms of mana by connecting them with mine?
If that was possible, it was going to open up a lot of doors for me in the long run.
But I couldn’t get too far ahead of myself. All we had for the moment was a hypothesis. “Okay, can we test that?”
Keras nodded. “Sure. It’ll be good to figure out how much control you have. That can help determine what techniques I can teach you right now. Try this.” His aura stretched out over his sword, then he swung it in the air. A shockwave flew out as expected, but it veered sharply to the right, rather than directly following the trajectory of the swing.
I immediately understood just how useful that kind of technique could be. Everyone would expect an attack to come directly at them — if he could make a shockwave curve off to the side, that was an extremely useful trick in itself. He could anticipate someone’s attempt to dodge, or hit another enemy entirely.
What else could he do?
I was extremely curious, but I needed to focus.
I tried mimicking him, swinging in mid-air and pushing mana out of my hand as usual. The shockwave went straight forward before I could actively concentrate on guiding it another way. And once the shockwave was free of my sword, I couldn’t sense any connection to it.
But I could sense one, ever-so-briefly, when my mana and the sword’s aura met. Keras was right. It was faint, near instantaneous, but a connection was there.
I tried it again and again, but with the same results.
I’d trained myself with my expectations for how the attack was supposed to work. In order to get it to behave differently, I had to find a way to reshape not just the mana, but how I was thinking about the attack.
“Try thinking about me as your target,” Keras suggested, “But I’m going to stand off to the side, rather than in front of you. Swing forward, but try to guide the shockwave toward me.”
I nodded. I wasn’t even going to mention that a success would mean an attack coming straight toward Keras. I knew by now that my attacks were no threat to him. He was clearly specialized in offensive combat, and he didn’t have a traditional shroud, but I was confident he could knock my attacks out of the air with his bare hands if he felt like it.
Even with a target in mind, forcing my attack to arc was surprisingly difficult. I swung and swung, pushing shockwave after shockwave out of the sword.
In the end, it was a moment of frustration that did it. I didn’t think about it — not consciously, like I’d been trying to. I just swung and wanted the aura to move.
And it did.
It didn’t get anywhere near Keras. Not due to his extraordinary skills, but because my aim was way off. The wave curved so hard to the left that it almost made a circle, and then flew off into the night air to dissipate.
It hadn’t been close to what I’d been looking for, but it had worked.
At least in the loosest possible sense. I’d gotten my shockwave to move in a different way, and that meant I could connect with my sword’s aura.
And that was where the real training started.
I only had a handful of days left before my final exam.
I threw most of that time into learning sword aura manipulation techniques.
Once I was in a little better state of mind, Keras went and grabbed Marissa to join us. She was already working on similar techniques, but using her own shroud rather than a weapon’s aura.
I planned to switch to using my shroud once I had the ability to work with it, but for the moment, this was excellent practice.
Keras nodded to us as we began our next lesson. “You both seem to have a solid grasp of the basics of manipulating your aura blade…even if Corin is still cheating a bit.”
I smirked. “I’m always walking the line between cleverness and cheating. If good tactics qualify me as a cheater, I’ll take that label and wear it with pride.”
After some trial and error, I’d figured out that only being able to sense the aura for an instant wouldn’t give me the kind of fine control that I needed in order to aim one of those blade shockwaves properly.
To fix that, I’d practiced manifesting a tiny thread of mana connecting my hand to the rune that generated the transference aura. Maintaining the thread required a tiny amount of my mana, but it created a persistent connection that let me sense and manipulate the aura freely.
Keras rolled his eyes at my remark. “We’re getting started. I’ve got something a little different in mind today. Marissa, make a blade aura.”