The Sixth School Boo Ii

Author's note.

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All Characters in the story are 18 years of age and above...

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Chapter Eleven: Changes...

The only people for whom life makes perfect sense are the insane.

Greg wasn't sure where he'd heard that statement but it perfectly encapsulated what he was feeling at the moment. A part of him was convinced that he had gone crazy as that was the only way he could accept everything he had found out since waking up three days ago. After all, how else could one make sense of the fact that, after running away from them for the past six months, he was now in a carriage headed to the Governor's castle to meet up with the same seventh-tier mages that had been chasing them? And if that wasn't quite enough to throw one for a loop, then there was the fact that he wasn't going in as a captive or someone somehow forced to be there. If everything Olivia had told him was true, then their pursuers believed that their lives hung on by a thread. To them, Greg could easily be their executioner if they didn't appease him. Given the massive power differential between them, the situation was as ridiculous as a full-grown man being afraid that an infant would beat them black and blue if they weren't appeased!

It came as no surprise to Greg when he woke up three days prior to learn that he'd been passed out for more than a month straight. It had already been clear to him while working on his teacher that he was pushing his body far beyond what it was meant to handle. The fact that he hadn't done any irreversible damage to himself was nothing short of a miracle as far as he was concerned. He had made a high-stakes gamble and put everything on the line for a slim chance of success, all the while risking a catastrophic outcome if things didn't go the way he'd hoped. Greg would have been beyond happy with just succeeding at the task of dissolving his teacher's mana pathways. In the end, however, Greg gained far more than he could have even dared to dream of.

Greg might have come from another world, but he had come to care for his family in this world as his own. Whether this was as a result of vestigial feelings from Roka or not, he didn't know... or care really. After seeing that both his teacher and familiar were fine, Greg had naturally wanted to go see his mother and sister. After being away from them for so long, they were probably worried about him, not to mention missing him. Olivia, however, stopped him when he tried to leave. "You can't go see them before we spar," she had said. At first, Greg had chuckled, thinking that she was joking. The deadpan look she gave him, however, caused his amusement to morph into confusion as he realized that she was completely serious. "Just trust me on this, Master, it's for your family's safety," she had said.

Despite all his misgivings about her, so far, Olivia had never acted against him. Greg had thus been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. The two of them had stepped out of his room and walked in the opposite direction from where Olivia's clone was playing a game with his mother, and sister. Lothar was a short distance away from them meditating according to what Olivia reported. It didn't take them that long to find what they were looking for. A building that offered training rooms where people could go all out depending on their tier. Naturally, the higher one's tier, the more expensive the arena they'd need to hire. His teacher, who had tagged along, hired an arena for third-tier mages before following them to the arena they'd hired. Each arena was a closed room the size of a large hall that was powerfully warded against damage both of the physical and the magical kind. While his teacher stood off to the side, he followed his familiar to the center of the arena. Once they stood facing each other, all Greg got from Olivia was a single nod before she turned into a blur.

Barely ten seconds into the fight, Greg found himself feeling profoundly grateful that his familiar hadn't allowed him to go straight to his family. Before the procedure with his teacher, Greg wouldn't have been able to visually keep up with his familiar's speed, let alone react to it. Reacting on instinct, Greg took a step backward and pivoted to the right just as Olivia reached him with a powerful punch already flying at his head. In that split-second glimpse of his familiar, Greg's mind went through all the body language signals that his familiar had taught him to look for to see if it was a real attack or a feint meant to misguide him. Rather than try to evade the punch, Greg simply raised his hand to push it off course.

Despite the intimidating approach, there was no power behind the punch as it had only been a feint. The real attack came as a knee aimed at his midriff. Before, this attack would have been enough to blindside and fold him like a cheap rag. In that moment, however, Greg simply stepped to the side easily evading what before would have been an unavoidable attack. There was no thought to it as he sent a punch of his own at his familiar. He'd immediately been subsumed into the flow of combat and acted on instinct. At the back of his mind, Greg had been expecting Olivia to either block or evade his punch. After all, before the procedure with his teacher, he'd always had to work really hard to land a punch on her. One could thus understand his surprise when his knuckles connected with her sternum. That surprise, however, quickly turned to shock and horror, when Olivia flew off like a ragdoll and slammed into the arena's wall about fifteen feet away!

In retrospect, he probably should have immediately run to her aid to see if she was injured and what help she might have needed. At the time, however, Greg had stood frozen like a statue, blankly staring at Olivia's fallen form as she coughed and gasped for the air that had just been knocked out of her. His gaze had dropped to his fist as if he'd find there some sort of explanation as to what had just happened. Greg didn't know if it was because her body was made out of mana or if she was just that tough, but Olivia didn't seem to have any broken bones. A shocking fact considering the force of impact Greg felt when his knuckles connected to her sternum. The shock, however, didn't just stop there. Greg felt like he'd entered the Twilight Zone when he realized that barely three seconds had passed between Olivia nodding to him and her ramming into the wall.

Greg had trained hard over the months with Olivia to up his speed of action and reaction. His goal in that training, however, had been to at least be able to evade the most deadly of Olivia's blows, the rest he could just tank. Never in his wildest dreams, had he thought that he'd be able to not only match her speed, evade one of her attacks, and counter, all in the space of a single breath. More time had passed with him standing there shocked compared to the brief fight that had just taken place. He wasn't proud of it, but by the time Greg managed to get over the shock of what had just happened, Olivia was already back on her feet and looking at him with a predatory gleam in her eyes. "It would seem that I can finally get serious with you," she muttered with chilling glee.

Twelve hours. For twelve straight hours, Greg engaged in the most brutal fight he had ever been part of in both his lives. In those twelve hours, Greg got to see just how much Olivia had been holding back when she'd been training him before. When she ceased to hold back, Olivia stopped being just a fighter and morphed into a force of nature. Cold, unrelenting, unforgiving, and utterly merciless. Short of breaking his bones, or poking his eyes out, there was nothing that was off limits to the familiar. She came at him like an avalanche forcing Greg to pull out every last stop just to keep from being swallowed up. It would be a lie for Greg to say that it was an entirely pleasant experience for him. By the end of it, however, Greg was glad that Olivia had forced him to do it. He never would have understood just how much his body had changed without engaging in that fight.

It wasn't just that he was stronger or faster, everything about him had somehow been improved upon. His strength and speed were immediately obvious even from the first exchange. What one wouldn't notice was that even his thoughts came faster. It wasn't until after that he realized it, but even in the middle of the attack, Greg had been able to analyze her attack and plan a counter-strategy while it happened. Previously, Greg could only use preplanned responses to deal with Olivia whenever she was moving that fast. Either protect his vitals from attack or go for a sacrificial play where he hoped to cause as much damage to her as she did to him. Those were the only two preprogrammed responses he had as he didn't have the speed to evade her attacks, let alone consciously react to them. That had changed. While he hadn't managed to achieve parity with his familiar in terms of speed, she was no longer a blur when she moved that fast. He could exchange blows with her at speeds that would have been little more than a blur to him before. The changes, however, didn't stop there.

Greg's body was far tougher than he'd been before, his threshold for pain had risen to a ridiculous degree. In that fight, Greg had taken blows that, previously, would have shattered his bones to a fine paste. But not only did his bones not break, Greg was able to shrug the blows off and keep on fighting. The only reason Greg had been willing to try sacrificial counters before his upgrade was because Olivia had made it a point to punish him whenever Greg fell into a predictable pattern. "If your enemies know that you are going to turtle up anytime they make a serious attack, you are going to be easy pickings for them!" That had been her admonition during one of their sessions after Greg had tried to protect his vitals for the tenth time in a row, unsuccessfully at that! Greg had thus incorporated exchanging damage for damage into his fighting style. Not because it worked all that much, but because it kept him from being a one-trick pony.

In this fight, Greg found that his sacrificial plays were actually effective. Before, only one out of ten of his attempts at this strategy would succeed. That number had gone up to about half of them succeeding. A fact that led to another shocking discovery. He could hit harder than she did. Greg might not have the speed or skill in combat to match his familiar, but when his blows did manage to land, they carried a devastating force that even her strongest punches couldn't match. Greg had almost gotten himself knocked out when he figured this out. To him, Olivia had always been stronger and faster. The thought that he might have surpassed her in one of these areas felt so unreal to him that, for a second, he froze up in shock. Unsurprisingly, Olivia wasn't one to forgive such stupidity in the middle of combat. If Greg hadn't managed to get his head out of the way at the very last second, Olivia would probably have flipped him over with a full-force punch to the temple.

It was six hours into the fight that Greg realized that he wasn't growing tired. Yes, he was breathing hard. Yes, he was sweating. Yes, his muscles had that pleasant burn that one gets from a good workout, but he was nowhere near done. On top of everything else that had changed with him, he had also become a tireless engine. He was hitting just as hard in the sixth hour as he'd been in the first. Even at the twelve-hour mark, if not for Olivia calling for an end to the match, Greg was certain that he would have still been able to go on. The two of them had collapsed into a sweaty heap right where they stood, both panting from the exertion of the grueling fight. The whole arena was covered in splotches of his blood. This wasn't because the fight was one-sided but rather because Olivia's body was made out of mana. She looked and felt every bit as human as he did, she just didn't bleed like one.

As for him, this was the first time that Greg had really put the STALWART blessing that he got from his first feat of lust to the paces. Outside of the dungeons, that is. Half of all physical damage Greg received was negated. His body would heal from physical damage less than a second after receiving it. The best part about the healing was the fact that it wasn't just blind healing. Instead, it seemed to prioritize the more serious sections of an injury as opposed to just healing half of everything. For example, if someone was to slash open his abdomen and cut through his intestines. The blessing wouldn't just heal half of his intestines and the muscles and skin over it. Instead, the order of priority for the blessing would probably be his intestines first, followed by his abdominal muscles, and finally his skin. If he were to receive such an injury, the blessing would probably heal his intestines and leave his abdomen open for Greg to find some other way to heal. This made it so that all the worst damage that Olivia had managed to cause him in their fight was drastically mitigated or even outright negated almost immediately by the blessing. And so despite his blood being everywhere in the arena, Greg only had superficial wounds when the fight finally came to an end. And even those were quickly eliminated with a quick sip of the weeping flower tincture.

The healer, who'd thus far been calmly moving around the arena allowing them to fight to their heart's content, came to stand over them. "I'm not yet at the first tier, so I can't do a more in-depth analysis on you. But from what I've seen thus far, you're the equivalent of a late-stage, third-tier, body-enhancing mage," she had informed him.

"But... But how?" Greg had questioned between gasps. That he had been all around physically enhanced was not in question. How it had come to be was what he couldn't as yet puzzle out.

"Do you remember my desk back in your hometown? I passed my mana through it for several cycles as I was trying to understand the effect of mana on weaker bodies in an attempt to find a way to heal myself. The end result was that the wood became hard enough that not even the strongest man in your hometown would have been able to split it no matter how sharp their ax. Until I can do a deeper analysis of you, this is only conjecture, but I suspect that the same thing has happened with you, just faster. You have to remember Roka, you're not like other mages. What you have is an open mana circulation system. Part of the mana that flows through your channels is used up reinforcing the area around them. And given the fact that your channels encompass your whole body, it means that your whole body is reinforced by the mana that flows through you. To dissolve my mana pathways, you were crazy enough to absorb the mana of a seventh-tier mage to increase the density of your mana. Had it been anyone other than you, that first drop of mana would probably have been enough to do irreversible damage to their mana pathways, if not dissolving them entirely. With how tempered your mana pathways were during your ascension, however, you were able to somehow pull off something that should have been impossible. For a whole month, you channeled my mana as you chipped away at what remained of my mana pathways. But while you worked on me, my mana seems to have also been working on you," his teacher laid out her theory.

Greg had stayed silent for a bit, turning the idea over in his head. Just as his teacher had said, it was pure speculation on their part until they could look more deeply into it. Greg, however, couldn't help but think that this was indeed what had happened as every piece seemed to fit together perfectly. Besides, it's not like he had any other explanations for the changes that had taken place in him. As things stood, this explanation was just as good as any. Greg had, at this point, turned to his familiar and given a nod of appreciation. "Thank you for getting me to do this," he'd said truly meaning it. If Greg had gone to meet his family without knowing just how much stronger he'd become, chances are that someone would have gotten hurt because he didn't control his strength and assumed he was just as strong as before. She had prevented such an outcome by having him spar with her. Olivia just smiled and nodded in acknowledgment. Greg turned back to his teacher. "Are there any other changes I should look out for?" He posed.

"Actually, yes," she'd replied. "Olivia closely monitored your mana pathways and mana density while you were passed out. Your mana pathways managed to pull through with very minimal damage despite the strain they were put through. Your mana density slowly came back down with time. We were expecting it to go back to what it was before the procedure. But rather than going back down to the equivalent of someone in the late stage of the second tier, it stopped going down at the same level as one in the middle of the third tier. We're not as yet sure why this is, but as you currently stand, you have enough mana to match a third-tier mage," she explained.

"Perhaps the stronger the vessel, the more the amount of mana it can handle." A year of learning under the healer had caused Greg to pick up the habit of trying to unravel magical mysteries just as she was always trying to do. Although, admittedly, Greg didn't have the wealth of magical knowledge his teacher had accrued over the centuries. Instead, his approach was usually to go with what made most sense to him.

There was a long silence as his teacher considered his words. Though she was always like this, for some reason, it still surprised him that she listened to him and his theories. Most people that had amassed as much knowledge as she had would have also grown proportionately arrogant. Not his teacher though. To her, there only existed questions and the answers to them, where she got the answers to those questions from, however, was irrelevant to her. She'd probably sit and listen to a mundane child lecture her if that child could increase her pool of knowledge. This endless curiosity on her part was probably what gave her such a sharp mind. "If what you say is true, then you're going to have to find ways to keep on strengthening your body. Preferably less lethal ones," she finally stated, adding the last bit with a bit of humor.

Despite laughing along with her, he agreed. Greg never wanted to experience the kind of pain he had in that last month of healing his teacher. Did he regret helping his teacher? Not in the least. That, however, didn't mean that it wasn't the worst experience of both his lives. Greg wasn't at all interested in experiencing it a second time.

"Now only one thing remains," his teacher stated holding out a small box to him. Greg immediately recognized the box, knowing that inside was an Azra's bead. Greg arched an eyebrow at his teacher even as he picked the box from her. "You spent a whole month absorbing and cycling tier-seven mana through your channels. I would be shocked if it hasn't had an effect on you..."

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Greg couldn't help but glance away from the window of the carriage and down to the little bead he'd been deftly moving between his fingers. The bead was growing such a bright white that, if one didn't look closely, they would miss the light brown mixed into the color. If not for the fact that he could still feel a connection to the earth under him, Greg himself would have missed the fact that he still had some affinity to the earth element. Given how light the brown was his affinity for the earth element had definitely degraded significantly. But rather than completely eliminating his affinity to the earth element, the life mana seems to have just raised his affinity to the school of life far past what his earth-element affinity had been even at its peak.