“Hm…” Dan mused to himself, “it’s a little short.”

  Sam had to suppress the urge to reply with a very obvious joke. Erianna apparently didn’t. “Sam gets that a lot,” she said with a smile. “But he definitely needs a longer one.”

  “Remind me again why you’re here?” Sam asked her.

  “I never got the opportunity to pick a training artifact for myself; I wanted to see what it’s like.”

  “It’s not like this, I can tell you that.” Dan smiled as he moved on to the next spear. “You usually take what you’re given, and even if you don’t, you usually don’t get much leeway and help in picking one for yourself.”

  “Not in the republic, maybe. Unfortunately for us, we have a little thing called feudalism that prevents us from taking control of critical industries as we want to. So our stockpile of training artifacts isn’t big enough to just hand them out en masse.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “At this point, you’re just doing it on purpose.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “How about this one?” Dan asked and handed Sam a spear that was almost as high as him.

  Sam grabbed it and, finding that there wasn’t really a need to get adjusted to the weight, carefully twirled it around to check its balance. “I like it,” he said. “But I also liked the other two you showed me, so what do I know?”

  Dan nodded but nevertheless said, “If you’re fine with this one, then this is the one we’ll pick.” He raised an eyebrow at Erianna’s look of concentration. “Any objections, Miss Ninae?”

  “It’s a little too lightweight for Sam, I think. He’ll grow past it in a matter of months.”

  “Undoubtedly so. But that’s the good thing about studying at an academic institution such as this one. And having personal supervision as to your progress. When Sam needs a new training artifact, he’ll get one.”

  Erianna shrugged. “I guess it makes sense. There’s no reason to be extravagant and have a more adjustable one.”

  “Is that what you had?”

  She nodded. “Until about I was eighteen.”

  “That’s… well, as you said, there’s not quite a need for that.”

  Sam smiled and nodded to himself. “Man, I love knowing what other people are talking about.”

  Dan slightly shook his head. “I’m not going to act as though you haven’t already done your own research on the matter, Sam. Besides, by this time tomorrow you’ll have already had all these gaps in your education filled.”

  “Well, as long as I get to complain now.”

  With his training artifact chosen, he went to fill in his information with the attendant on duty, a usually lengthy process which Dan’s presence greatly sped up. Bureaucratic necessitates over with, they left the building and started heading back towards the center of campus, Sam and Erianna to dinner and Dan to wherever it was that he spent his dinners at.

  “I still find it weird that they allow you to take out training artifacts but not the regular training weapons,” Sam said to Dan.

  “Hm… what? You’re allowed to take out a training weapon with you if you want.”

  Sam almost stopped in his place. “What are you talking about? I never saw anyone coming or going with one.”

  “Of course not. Most of the physical combat training happens in the gyms, where there are plenty of training weapons to be had. And for those that don’t train there, they usually just use their training artifacts. It’s the same thing after all.”

  Sam threw an incredulous look at Erianna. “Did you know about that?”

  “Sam, I’ll be honest with you. I probably devote a larger than necessary amount of my own time to thinking about your training. But even I don’t spend enough time thinking about you in order to wonder why you didn’t grab a wooden spear for your own personal use.”

  “Well, the good thing is that you finally admit the first part.”

  Dan turned to face them and said, “I’ll split up with you here. Sam, I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a good night, both of you.”

  “Good night,” they wished him back. Sam shook his head as they resumed their walk. “I still can’t believe I could’ve grabbed myself a spear to train with in my own time.”

  “Be honest, would you have really made much use of it?”

  “Hm… probably not. Just weird that I never realized you could take one with you. You’d think that I would’ve asked at some point. Especially you, with all of your thinking about me.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “That’s just what I was about to suggest. I want to leave this in my room.” He held the spear artifact aloft. “Want to tag along?”

  “Like I have anything better to do.” Erianna sighed.

  “With you, it’s never really clear.”

  “You’re not going to question me about tomorrow again, are you?” She gave him a narrow stare.

  “No, no.” Sam held up his hands. “You’ve convinced me already. And obviously, I need to start integrating the Threadsight into my fighting as soon as I am able. So you’re free to tag along and try to find a place to slot your own teaching into Lin’s.”

  “Oh, thank you so much for giving me permission. Besides, I’m not going to start teaching you anything tomorrow. I just want to see how Lin teaches you to fight so I could take that into account when carrying out my own duties and when it comes time for you to start incorporating threads into your fighting.”

  “Ah… your never-ending duties. Such a conscientious young soul.”

  “You’re one to talk, asshole.” She wrinkled her nose in thought as she swiped some of her hair to the side and asked him, “Where would you rate your own capabilities with the Sight, right now? Wait, let me rephrase that: How long do you think you can maintain it without discomfort, and how long overall?”

  Sam gave her a confused look. “What brought this on all of a sudden?”

  “Nothing, I just want to hear your own opinion on where you’re at. I don’t have any more experience in training someone to use the Sight than you, after all.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch, especially at this point, but alright.” Sam shrugged. “So, for the first one… I’d say about three minutes? Maybe four if I don’t focus on anything in particular and really try to suppress any incoming information.”

  Erianna nodded. “And overall?”

  “Eh… that’s really hard to answer, you know?”

  “Sure, it depends on the circumstances and a dozen other variables. Give me a guess. A rough estimate of how long you could go for if I asked you right now.”

  “Hm…” Sam smiled as the first response that came to his head was a joke. Erianna rolled her eyes when she thought of it as well, but still gave a chuckle. “I guess… Tsk. I don’t know. I think I could go upwards of an hour of uninterrupted use, you know? Probably longer if I really put my foot down and didn’t care about how I was going to feel the next couple of days. Let’s say an hour and a half, then. Sounds about right?”

  “It does, but I would actually rate it higher, just because there’s a point where you grow numb to the pain and it all becomes a little easier to manage.”

  “Yeah, the fabled mental second wind. I know, I know, it’s not really a second wind, but since I won’t be on its receiving end anytime soon, I’m going to call it what I want. So what would you say, two hours?”

  She nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Alright, so four minutes and two hours. Now, why does it matter?”

  “It is relevant to whether, when, and how I would start incorporating threads into your combat training, you know?”

  “I do know. But does it matter all that much to make it so error and trial isn’t our best way to go about it?”

  “Probably not. Still, it’s important for me to have a clear picture of where you’re at. And what your pace is.”

  “Is it? I mean, I’d have thought Farris would help you in that regard. Actually, I know he does.”

  “If I’m doing something, then I want to get better at it. I’m not going to just rely on Farris to do my job for me. Besides, I’m here and he’s not. And it’s always better to have two opinions than just one.”

  Sam shrugged. “Fair enough. So what is your opinion concerning my pace?”

  “Frighteningly fast,” she said with a smile, making direct eye contact with Sam on purpose so that he’ll feel uncomfortable.

  He cleared his throat and sped up a little so he’d have a better chance of hiding his blush. “Well… thank you, I guess.”

  “You have to get used to people thinking you’re special, Sam.” She laughed. “And of thinking of yourself as better than most other people.”

  “Is that something that’s really healthy to think?”

  “Sure it is, if it’s true. I’m not saying better as in your all important ethical perspective. But better as in stronger, smarter, more dedicated and such. More talented as well.”

  “Oh, I don’t have problems admitting to being more talents so long as those talents and their developments are wholly divorced from my own option luck.”

  “No such thing, I’m afraid.”

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Sam sighed. “Yeah… I know. Still, you grew with these talents. With knowing your own worth was high.”

  “And you didn’t?” Erianna asked sarcastically.

  “Well, sure I did. But only in some aspects. And in them, life kept dealing me a shitty hand and knocking me back down. You know I’ve always liked and tried to think of myself as special. But until I got here, the most special thing about me was… you know.”

  “Your uniquely grotesque penis?”

  “Exactly. Which is totally brute luck.”

  “Ugh… You know you’re the only one who understands and cares about all these types of luck you keep talking about.”

  “That’s true for most of what I say.” Sam laughed. “Fine, I’ll try to keep it to a minimum until I have a chance to lecture you all a little bit.”

  “Goody, I can’t wait.”

  “Fuck, I’m tired for some reason,” Sam said as he and Erianna laid their backpacks down at the edge of the training room.

  “Trouble getting to sleep?”

  “No. And the sleep was also great. Didn’t have, or at the very least, don’t remember any dreams. Just… tired, for some reason.”

  “Nerves, then.”

  “What would you know about nerves?” Sam smiled.

  “Nothing from personal experience. I just assumed based on my observation of you lesser life-forms.”

  Sam sighed as he dropped down to sit next to the bags, taking out his bottle for a sip. “The most annoying thing is that I know that it will soon pass. Just got to get some blood pumping in my veins and it’ll go away. But why can’t it go away now? Why am I tired to begin with? And why did I have to suffer twenty-two years of life without having the ability to do away with fatigue so easily?”

  “All good questions.” Erianna nodded absentmindedly. “Oh, Lin’s here.”

  Sam got up with a groan, and they both walked over to greet Lin as he entered the room. Lin’s gaze immediately honed in on Sam’s new training artifact and lingered for a few seconds before he finally nodded. “Not going to check it yourself?” Sam asked.

  “No need. I trust Dan’s judgment. So, are you ready to begin?”

  Sam nodded, and Erianna said, “I’ll watch for the most part. But I’m also down to help if you have need of me. I’m going to be here the whole session after all.”

  “Of course. And thank you again. Utilizing Sam’s abilities as a Thread-Weaver is paramount to his successful training as a combatant, and it is the one aspect with which I cannot help him. So I’m very grateful that you’re giving more of your free time to be here.”

  “We’re both grateful,” Sam said with a nod. “Heavens know how precious your own time is.”

  Erianna threw him an angry glare before turning back to Lin. “Just doing my part. I’m here mainly to teach Sam, after all. He’d have done the same if he were in my shoes.”

  Sam pursed his lips in question but still kept them closed. “Good,” Lin said, “so we’ll start with the usual warm-ups, and a little of the regular exercises, then we’ll move on to the meat of the matter, yes?”

  “Yes.” Sam nodded. Even with all three of them forgoing breakfast to train until lunch, that still wasn’t going to be enough time to cover all the things Sam had been waiting to learn for so long. But it was a start. He tried not rushing through the first part of the lessons, which wasn’t hard because he was still feeling somewhat tired as he started running laps around the room, skipping over Erianna’s leg, which stretched to trip him whenever he ran by past her. But it got a little harder after he finished warming-up and fully waking. So he had to force himself to slow down as he worked through his spearfighting exercise.

  “Good, you can stop now,” Lin said and handed Sam his training artifact. Erianna, still seated by the wall, watched absentmindedly from the sidelines, probably focusing on cultivating. “Let’s begin with the basics. Trace fully through the weapon, let’s say a dozen times.”

  Sam nodded, stopping himself from asking whether this was all the instruction he was going to get for this incredibly pivotal first lesson. After all, he already knew everything that he had to in order to follow Lin’s instructions, and it’s not like he had no idea of what tracing through an artifact was like. You didn’t need to know him as well as Dan did to realize that he would’ve spent a fair amount of time doing his own preemptive research into what magical combat pertained.

  Strengthening the grip of his right hand on the spear, he started drawing magic into his hand, from there, he guided it towards the spear shaft until the magical energy’s proximity was close enough, and its concentration was strong enough, to trigger the initial opening pattern in the artifact. He felt the connection instantly, as his mind was able to perceive the additional pathways that were suddenly connected to his right hand. Grabbing hold of the existing energy, and channeling even more to his hand, Sam started tracing through the new pathway and into the spear.

  Weapon artifacts—especially training ones, which were made specifically to be easy to use—were made to allow the formation of a tracing loop starting and ending at almost every single point of the artifact. In this case, the loop happened to start where Sam right hand’s pads met the spear, and continued counter-clock wise (since the convention was both for the pattern flow up the weapon and for the artifact to be made for right-handed people) up the shaft, to the spearpoint, before going back down and all the way around.

  Tracing through the artifact, Sam could easily feel the difference between his own pathways and the artifact’s. The artifact’s pathways carried much greater resistance than Sam’s own body. A minute of tracing through the artifact would lose him more energy than at least ten minutes of tracing through his own body. And training artifacts were supposed to be some of the most efficient artifacts when it came to resistance. No wonder unarmed fighting was the third most common form after spear and sword.

  Still, there were of course drawbacks to fighting with your bare hands, as well as positives to being forced to spend so much of your magic on tracing through weapons. Not that it mattered all that much to Sam at this point. He had already made his choice—or had it made for him—and had come to terms with the spear being his weapon of choice. And he enjoyed fighting with it, which was the most important parameter at the end of the day.

  Tracing through the artifact’s artificial pathways was also slower than through his own pathways, not significantly slower, but enough so that it took him longer to finish Lin’s exercises or twelve full loops than he had thought it would. He wasn’t even sure why he was surprised. He knew it was going to be slower. It’s not like he somehow forgot it by the time he started tracing. But he was still surprised that it was going slower. Some things are better understood through first-hand experience, he thought with a mental shrug.

  As he finished tracing the last loop through the artifact, he noticed Erianna’s eyes re-focusing on him and Lin. Cultivating with the Threadsight on? That’s an interesting combination. I’ll have to give it a go sometime. “Done,” he told Lin and let out a breath that he wasn’t aware he had been holding.

  “Good. This is your most basic exercise. Do it at least three times a day for about five minutes each.”

  “Isn’t this just more pure tracing practice?”

  “In a sense. But it’s different enough to be worth it. You get better at tracing through the artifact. Your speed increases, and you can handle and avoid some of the resistance better. And since you’re pretty far off from using any artifacts complex enough for tracing speed to matter, it’s the latter that’s going to be of paramount importance to you.”

  Sam nodded and looked at the spear. “I noticed. Hard not to.”

  “Indeed. But as I said, you’ll get better at it. And you’ll have more energy to spare. The crux of magical combat training isn’t downsizing the drawbacks of artifact usage, but learning how to fight with and around them more efficiently. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Your second most basic exercise is tracing into other people. You can train it by yourself, although it’s not ideal.”

  “I think he’ll have plenty of volunteers to help him with this,” Erianna called from where she was sitting.

  “You’ll have me for three times a week.” Lin nodded. “So if you can find people for the other four days. You only need to do this once a day. And only for a month or so. Just to get used to doing it, especially since before too long you’ll be sparring with magic as well.”

  “Before too long?” Sam raised an eyebrow. “I just started fighting with… the general public three weeks ago.”

  “Yes, but you’ve been fighting for more than half a year before that. Don’t worry, it won’t be too long before you’ll have your first taste of ‘real’ magical combat.”

  “First taste of defeat.”

  “We all have to start somewhere. So, let’s start: make sure you’re tracing fully though the spear, you can manage with just the tip, since that’s the part you’re going to be hitting me with, but it’s better to start developing a habit of having the entirety of the artifact available for you to attack with. Before too long, it would be a moot point anyway. So, once you’re tracing fully through the artifact, stab me.”

  Sam readied his spear and leveled it against Lin’s chest. A few seconds after his magic completed looping around the artifact, he was satisfied that Lin was ready and thrust the spear at his chest. The point connected with Lin’s body, and Sam was suddenly aware of the ability to drive the magic from the artifact into Lin. Not waiting for Lin’s instructions, he followed that sense of awareness, only to find that he had to wrench control of the energy back to prevent it from going fully into Lin and stopping to loop around the artifact pathways.

  “Good instincts,” Lin said. “What you’re training is the ability to keep tracing through the artifact while also diverting magic into your enemy so that your attacks will damage them. Now, again, do this ten times, five seconds for each stab.”

  Sam complied, retracting his spear before driving it into Lin’s chest once again. This time he was ready for it and had an easier time controlling the magic flowing around and out of the artifact. It still wasn’t perfect; the tracing through the artifact was still disturbed, but it was better than before. Of course, the alternative, which he saw in his third attack, was to control the flow too tightly so that barely any magic would trickle into his opponent.

  Once he finished with the tenth attack, Lin nodded and said, “Good, this will be your second basic exercise. And we’ll be incorporating them into our usual combat routines.”

  “Ehm…” Sam frowned. “It doesn’t really strike me as all that… practical in combat.”

  “No.” Lin nodded. “In real combat, you’ll almost always want your attack to result in a burst of magic going into your enemy, rather than a continuous flow. Like how we trained until now. Attack and retreat to attack again. But training to continuously trace magic into your opponent provides a good foundation for training to trace in a single burst. And of course, ideally, you’d want to combine the two to some degree. But we’ve just began, we’re still a few weeks off from having you need to consider the practicalities of magical combat.”

  Sam nodded and followed Lin’s instructions in running through those two exercises four more times, with ten repetitions each. It was monotone, yes, and a little disheartening coming from the high of the warm-up exercises, but he still felt excited, nonetheless. It wasn’t every day that you could learn for the very first time how to fight with magic. Once he finished with the exercises, he suddenly noticed that he was more tired than he expected. Lin, however, did expect it and sent him to have a two-minute break.

  “How’s your core doing?” Erianna asked as Sam drank from his bottle.

  “Ehm…” Sam laid his bottle back down. “A little over half empty, damn… and all I did was pure tracing.”

  “Resistance is a motherfucker.”

  “Resistance is a motherfucker,” he agreed. “Always has been, now that I think about it.”

  “You’ll get better. And, more importantly, stronger.”

  “Yes… two to the power of ten stronger. God, that’s insane to think about it.”

  Erianna shrugged. “You get used to it.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “The sentiments about energy usage as you go up the levels don’t really change,” she explained. “You get to level 10, and you just have more demanding patterns and more stuff you need to constantly trace. You’ll always be looking for more core capacity.”

  Sam nodded. “We get used to the new status quo and quickly grow dissatisfied with it. I know that feeling very well.”

  “It is what it is.” Erianna smiled and went back to mostly focusing on her cultivating.

  Sam annoyed her by twirling a finger in front of her eyes for a few seconds, which she pretended to be below noticing, before going back to join Lin. “I want to cover some of the basics; terms; almost universal laws; the like. This should take us about two or three hours, enough for your core to passively recharge a fair amount.”

  Sam gave a questioning shrug. “Not all that much. I still only have the one passive gathering pattern, remember?”

  “Hm… true. But it’s fine. We’ll have enough to do today even if you run out of energy. So, take a fighting stance, I want you to work through some of what I’m saying. No reason to waste our time standing still, yes? Now, the first major part of magical combat training is simply learning how to leverage magic with your usual combat skills. Meaning, how to use the most basic elements of magic—i.e. tracing through the artifact and into the enemy—without changing anything else about the way you fight.

  “This is, without a doubt, the simplest yet most important lesson there is to learn about magical combat. It’s the basis of everything else. No matter how strong you might be, how good you are at defending from enemy attacks, and redirecting their magic if you happened to get hit, it won’t matter if your hits don’t count for anything. And for all Martyrs, and for most of the Brutes that you’ll encounter on the battlefield, bare physical attacks aren’t going to be enough. And since we can’t all carry the firepower of a tank in our hands, magic is a prerequisite to winning an encounter with the enemy.

  “What we focus on in this part of the training is twofold: First, like we’ve already done, you’re going to work on getting better with the mechanics of offensive tracing. Faster tracing through the artifact, more energy traced to the enemy. That’s simple to grasp. The second part of the training, the one that will last with us for as long as you’re here, is leveraging those mechanics to be more efficient at killing your enemy. What this means is that even with the same speed of tracing, with the same amount of energy being traced into your enemy, and with hitting the same spot on said enemy, you’ll be able to inflict more damage. How to do that you’ll learn here, with Dan, and also by yourself. So yes, this includes a lot of theory. You’re going to be reading a lot.”