Aleck had stopped counting out the number of his defeats around day twelve... and started counting up his improvents instead. Scrambling, desperate struggles that kept ending in minutes with his face buried in Magnetic sand until he could fight again wasn’t what he wanted to focus on. Even barely understanding how to draw in essence into his field in this location, he was *almost* forced to learn while unconscious. And he could feel his own Elent control strengthening because of it.
Three weeks total in the Astral Exclave’s training courtyard against the drone had reshaped more than just that. His teor hamr technique improved by fighting sothing that could catch, deflect... or a few tis *severed* the links. That happenstance forced him to go through so ’copies’ of the weapon Elua ’begrudgingly’ prepared. By the second week, he was sure she was lying and subtly changing sothing he couldn’t truly see about those replacents each ti... as he’d still lasted only about twenty minutes total.
’Maybe both this combat unit and I are just improving at the sa rate?’
Yet, he was now landing hits that actually seed to damage the strong, segnted limbs. Crystal sheared and fractured a few tis on truer hits than he used to be capable of. Damage that required replacent... the sphere floating off for that to Elua while he was inevitably still stuck back in the ’healing sands’. The change to both sides in the extended conflict requiring so downti was progress in his mind.
So too, did his spirit progress.
Forced to keep his asure Astralism active, that old headache finally faded even under this new onslaught of information. Each link of the chain’s distance almost sang around him, the areas most vulnerable for himself and for the opponent were often like blank spaces in the middle of the jumble. For now, it was enough that he was appropriately feeding all of that information straight to his brain to be used in physical movents that flowed with lovely balance thanks to his easily enhanced Cerebellum.
Feeling the proximity of everything around them all at once, to various degrees of success and accuracy, was the greatest tool of any cloud-type spirit. It was also the easiest type deceived, but Elua was letting the fighter focus on how his Aspect helped his martial combat for now. Turning him - like she would hope to do for anyone she relied on or liked - into a competent and dedicated spiritualist... could progress later. If the fighter would perhaps stop challenging her construct every ti he woke back up.
Aleck had realized, after things really began clicking together in the heat of fighting, that he’d been denying himself the synergy by quieting his spirit. The competence he’d grown into with his weapon had been sothing of a slightly superior crutch that so often prevented him from ’needing’ to fight harder and desperately. Tricky movents confused cultivators and mortals... and the defensive swirls and heavy blunt strikes could handle all but the largest groups of Voidlings.
The Goltbred patriarch had seen the shift happen gradually. From careful struggle to pushing limits, from trying hard to trying *everything*. The young man’s essence field also no longer radiated weakly throughout his entire spiritual sense, but had begun aligning itself into a particular toroidal structure, ringed around the polar axis of his body and constantly shifting about its size thanks to the electromagnetism of his surroundings. Barely understanding the technical reasons about it, the warrior was mostly letting himself do whatever felt natural at any point.
Elua kind of began to hate him for the level of genius he was showing, even if it required the hard work of being smacked down over and over again. She wondered idly a few tis, while visiting to look over the ’test results and make adaptations to the spiritual fragnt operating the construct... if intentionally making the fight more impossible by increasing the density of her martial mories on the ’capture, not kill’ layer of sigilry would be too overbearing.
But ultimately, she did not want him to overco her hard work even quicker than he was. She was there the ti he finally ’won’. When he slamd the much improved ball of tal she’d given him into the center carapace section, hard enough to surpass the allotted energy use and for them all to disconnect and float away in its ergency recovery mode. Leaving only limbs disconnected and twitching like lizard tails flopping around to distract the opponent.
The man backed away from them and stood in the center of the courtyard, hands on knees, breathing hard. The chain pressed into his grip and legs, teor hamr resting simply where it dragged away from that success against the foundational stone. His spirit was filled with *exhaustion* and ’pride’. Sothing Ondua was ready to congratulate him warmly over...
"Well done."
But slow clapping and a far too ’saccharine’ voice interrupted, to steal the mont from him first. The reincarnator would much rather ’kick’ the man while he was down and the bubble was still small... than let it inflate too far along with his sharply rousing ego. Mint eyes were bright with a satisfaction that had nothing to do with ’kindness’. After all, it took ti to put those things back together!
’This idea of mine is working, but it also increased my *workload*. What does it matter that I was going to be stocking parts for them anyway, it doesn’t an I wanted to rush the assembly lines *now*!’
"You can handle one. That’s good. Very good."
Aleck straightened slowly, still catching his breath. Sothing about her tone made the pride in his chest curdle into wariness.
"...One?"
"They’re designed to work as a group. Why would I hope a single one of these could take any given cultivator down?"
She raised one hand - horizontal and flat - starting from her hip to chest height with a slight smile on her face. Fingers splayed out like willing sothing to ’rise’ while dense essence rippled outward from the ground underneath of her. A sigil controlled the pulse that still made the air shimr along hidden pathways. The large scale construction she had been working on miles away was active - and the ’training ground’ responded.
A show of light blood beneath their feet - not everywhere at once, but in successive patterns as the rings of sigil-script were ignited across the courtyard’s foundation. Glowing in sequences that spread in distracting spirals outward from central points. Aleck counted fifteen rings trailing on a single set before he lost track as the *three and a half feet* asurent that each seed to be finally made sense... and set him at maximum wariness.
The stone supposedly inside the lit circles rippled like liquid as the Illusion dissolved to reveal what had always been hidden underneath. Dozens of white tal spheres floated directly up from inside the very foundation, erging from their concealed recesses with silent motion and identical to the ’one’ that the teor hamr user had just defeated. They spread across the courtyard in a kind of formation, positioning themselves at intervals that the witnesses to this mont could imdiately register as *tactical*.
Maintaining an exact distance from its neighbors, each sphere was close enough to support the other with appendages once they were activated, yet far enough to avoid any clustered vulnerability. A whole fleet of combat drones had been stored under them - a small army that the visitors never knew was there. That would theoretically have had the sa capability as they did that first ’test run’ against Aleck... if they could have been sent on a sortie so easily.
"Elua. Didn’t you say this... particular automaton was powered in part by excess from your Gateway? How are you powering *all* of these?"
Ondua asked with a bit of dread in his heart. It was hard not to see a bomb as an unexploded device, just as it was hard not to see these eighty-eight ’simple spheres’ as *not-yet fighting* machines.
"I couldn’t. Not until a day ago."
Hopping up on panels of air and spinning around happily, she gestured toward the distance. Miles of energy transference was no simple matter and had taken as long to produce and lay resonators as did the whole containnt array. It wasn’t visible from this far, in the daylight - but just might seem a bit obvious at night in the Exclave, with the unsubtle light pollution that the crystals would put off.
"But now my primary power station is finished. I have leeway for things like this now."
"That array... is active?"
Dima’s horrified voice ca from the edge of the ’training ground’, where the branch manager stood apart from Madrigil. Both had arrived during the reveal... but only she had been drawn there by annoying little illusions promising that there was sothing impressive to see today. Both of the sigilists had of course taken an interest so days in watching the construct in action, but while the ’forrly’ mad noble had willingly taken a single beating to get close to it himself... the forr liaison had no such insanity.
’If I could fight well, I wouldn’t be a low-paid scholar!’
"Stabilized to satisfaction as of thirty-three hours ago and operational as of forty-three minutes ago."
Hearing the figures co out of his mouth, the woman shivered and looked at the older man, highly aggrieved. She really missed talking to normal people. The Goltbred Patriarch was the closest available, but even he just kept handwaving all the strange things if given enough ti...
"You knew about this? You said it still looked highly unsteady last ti I was there!"
"I was there during the final tuning. It was beautiful when the buildup began in the containnt fields. I can only imagine how catastrophic it will be if it fails!"
"Alright, you’re banned from that location now. There are eleven of these drones there and no healing formations, so don’t test ."
The brunette wheeled on Madrigil and pointed threateningly, a hard thing to do when standing on top of a rather smooth sphere. However, the ancient cultivator’s balance was just as good or better than Aleck’s and, frankly, she was certain he would have improved faster with direct instruction - but that wouldn’t have accomplished multiple things at once as she much preferred.
Elua didn’t have the ease of improvent his Physique provided those particularly bodily structures, where the Aspect generated nearly optimal paths for physical energy to pool and flow... but she was more than familiar with the Reforge techniques necessary to provide similar boons. Stolen from Guilds, personal libraries, and improved and modified over the millennia. It wasn’t the only reason she studied so many spirits and how to catalog Aspects through them, yet it was certainly a big part.
’So much mimicry of others. It’s no wonder my growing body wanted to reject it all and just be itself. Well, at least I worked it all out now~’
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