I went into the house and headed straight to bed. I was exhausted from all of the time spent leveling up my magic manipulation skills. I was also feeling that now-familiar soreness across my whole body I got from practicing the chaos body strengthening technique for long periods. In my tiredness, I had no trouble falling asleep and managed to sleep through the night without any strange dreams, waking up prematurely, or more pain.

The next morning, I felt rested and ready to train some more. Cindy, Taylor, and Steph were all busy working on getting the guild up and running or training their abilities, so I didn’t get much chance to talk to them. We had a short breakfast when we all woke up, but after that, we went our separate ways.

Heading to the training ground, I made my way to the pond so I could continue my work. In the background, I once again heard Donny hammering away at something. He, too, was working on improving himself, leveling up his blacksmithing so that he could make some enhanced gear. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him yesterday, but during breakfast Taylor said that the fifth wave and the evil gods spooked everyone pretty badly. The former slaves were trying to deal with the removal of the emotional suppressant, and then this mess just showed up as well. Everyone agreed that having a ready and able fighting force in the form of the adventurer’s guild would go a long way to, at the very least, give us a fighting chance if the worst were to happen and we were overrun by monsters.

I walked down the steps into the pool and decided to come up with the next plan of attack for my leveling. Similar to my aerokinesis, my hydrokinesis was limited to an area very close to my body. I was incapable of sending controlled water in any great amount more than 20 feet away from me. Attempting to create the pressurized air blade attack is what helped me over the level 40 to 50 hump for aerokinesis, and I needed a similarly powerful ability for hydrokinesis to do the same thing.

My water blade functioned by holding a large amount of water in place at once and doing my utmost to create a mono-molecular edge. Because I was holding it in place with magic, it was quick to fail, but as long as I sustained the blade it was incredibly sharp. Unfortunately, because water is so weak, the blade would only be as strong as the amount of magic I could pump into it. For example, if I were to try and cut a piece of wood with the water blade, I would only need to use 8 mana to cast the spell, but I would then need to continue using mana if I wanted to make any more than a single shallow cut. When I tested it, a piece of wood about 6 inches across took around 35 mana to slice through. Now, that was more than enough to make a nasty flesh wound on someone, but it was far more efficient to use the water blades as one-time casts, and just create multiple more shallow gashes.

Water, by its very nature, could not be pressurized as much as air. The difference was that water had much greater mass, and because of this, it could be used to cut metal at high pressure by eroding it away faster than the eye could see. My goal was to make something similar. I could use this spell to breach sealed doors while adventuring or use it to punch through a heavily armored enemy. I thought that the makeshift ‘spell’ would match water’s utility motif up to this point.

First, I gathered some water from the pond. It would take a pretty large amount of the stuff If I wanted to sustain the ability for a long amount of time. It was much easier to use water from large sources with hydrokinesis, but it was also possible to collect it from the air, though that was much more difficult.

I decided to hold the water in a sphere roughly a foot in diameter directly in front of my hand. This would not be a surprise attack if I needed to use it in the field, as it was extremely obvious. When I started to compress the water, instead of making the sphere smaller, I tried to pack more water in. The amount of water I added was minuscule, as pressurizing the water was nearly impossible. The whole was immensely difficult to do and was far more expensive than earlier designs of the pressurized air blade. It took me only five seconds of adding water to eat through 90 mana, and once again I felt that headache start to build in my mind.

I stopped taking in water and moved the orb to point at my target, a cinder block I found in the alley. After that, I punctured a small hole at the end of the orb. With a mighty whoosh, the water blasted out of the small opening. When It hit the block, it ate right through the stone, forming a small hole. I continually decreased the size of the orb, attempting to maintain the pressure, but I was unable to do it for long. The stream then picked up the block and sent it tumbling 15 feet away. The whole sphere was emptied in around two seconds but considering that it made it through six inches of fire-hardened stone, it would be more than powerful enough to do what I needed it to.

Knowing that it worked on stone, I could move on to the next test, metal. If I could get the water to cut through some sheet metal, I could use it to breach armor or doors while out and about, which was my intention. The only person who would have sheet metal was Donny, so I walked across the yard to his workshop, to see If he had anything I could practice on.

The hut’s inside was extremely hot and coming up to the door felt like walking into a desert. Inside, Donny was blasting a piece of metal with his fire breath, melting it into an ingot mold drop by drop.

I took a closer look at the metal he was melting, as it looked very familiar. Wait! That was my eggshell! How did I keep forgetting about it? I guess Cindy went into my room and brought it out. Forgetting all about it was so like me. I should try and play it off.

I waited until he stopped blasting the ingot with flames and nonchalantly said, “I see you got the eggshell from my room. Thanks for refining it. Make sure to save it for me though. I guess the water inside went to Michael, then?”

Donny turned to me, finally noticing that he was being watched. He gave me a toothy smirk, seeing me waiting in the doorframe.

“I got it out. Cindy just let me know about the eggshell, seeing as you kept forgetting all about it.”

Fuck. “Pshhh, Nah. Of course, I remembered it. *cough* Anyway, do you have any sheet metal I could use? I want to practice a cutting spell.”

He turned his head, gesturing to a pile of old rusted metal pieces against the side wall of the forge shed. That would do nicely. Grabbing a square of the stuff, I bid farewell to Donny and then headed back to the pond to train.

As I walked away, he shouted, “Make sure you remember to bring the pieces back!”

I yelled back and him, “You know me! Mind like a steel trap! Don’t worry about it.”

Who was I kidding? I could focus on one thing at a time, but any more than that and I started to just drop things off. I had the epitome of the one-track mind. If there was something important to get done, I was all over it, but otherwise, I tended to just leave things off and forget about them. It was more than a little bit inconvenient at times, but luckily, my forgetfulness had never really come back to bite me. Or had it, and I just didn’t remember? An immortal struggle. Anyway, it was time to get back to training.

Turns out, my new water attack could absolutely cut right through the half-inch of steel. As my magic emptied and filled again and again, I had a fun time cutting shapes out of the metal and trying to draw pictures. My hand was very unsteady at first, but after a while I got to the point where I could accurately make 90 degree turns consistently, and accurately enough that I couldn’t test it by eye.

By lunchtime I had managed to max out hydrokinesis and reach yet another milestone with beginner chaos body strengthening. I went ahead and checked the alert again to make sure a similar thing happened to hydrokinesis as what happened to aerokinesis when I maxed it out.

Skill Alert! Level Up! Skill Evolved!

General Skills:

Focus – lvl 7 -> 10 – (+10%) skill proficiency

Class Skills:

Beginner Chaos Body Strengthening – lvl 18 -> 19 – increased regeneration stats while using(+57%)

Magic Skills:

Hydrokinesis -> ???(2/3) – ??? – ???

Archetype Skills:

Lone Wanderer – lvl 41 -> 42

Max Status Increases:

+1 Str

+2 Agi

+1 Unassigned

Yep, sure enough. Like before, the magic skill evolved into a big mess of question marks. The fraction changed from 1/3 to 2/3 as well, so I’m obviously on the right track.

I guess it’s a good thing I saved the best for last then, leaving electrokinesis for the very end. I was already starting to get fatigued by the constant grinding, but this was almost certainly the most efficient way to grind out skill levels. I can almost guarantee that that crystal golem must have done something similar to what I was doing now. I guess he probably only had one manipulation skill, while I have three. It gave me more versatility, but it also made it harder to work on the skill. I hoped they would combine into a single ability after all of this was over. Anything to reduce the annoying amount of skills on my list. At least they all updated automatically. I couldn’t even imagine trying to update them all by hand. That would be tedious and unpleasant, that’s for sure.

Before starting work on electrokinesis, I decided to get some lunch. In the kitchen we had a loaf of fresh bread baked by the lizardkin girl who was working as a bartender. Apparently she was an incredible baker as well, because the bread she made was professional quality. I had a delicious fried egg sandwich with fresh vegetables, and then went back outside to go to work. I was more than halfway done, and lightning was without a doubt the coolest element that I had. At least I thought it was. That was half the reason I saved it for last.

Training electrokinesis while standing in the water seemed like a bit of a bad idea. Most of my work would be done out of the water then. I decided to set up some of the scrap metal around the training ground to act as targets for lightning blasts, and I got right to work.

For electrokinesis, I focused on blasts, holding balls of it in my hands, moving the orbs from one hand to another, keeping them floating around my body, and other things like that. The skill was based around control and keeping the electrical energy flowing around me, and from what I could tell, I had an even more limited range than the other two manipulation skills. After about 5 feet out of my body, the lightning generated tended to get a bit unruly. The blue arcs would occasionally move out and shock the ground or one of the trees, but luckily enough, my lightning wasn’t quite strong enough to do little more than singe the trees a bit. I couldn’t imagine that Taylor would be too happy about it, but hopefully she would forgive me. Mostly though, the stray arcs just zapped the bits of metal I had scattered around. They were the only thing I could target and hit with any amount of regularity, but that made perfect sense given the metal’s natural conductive properties.

As I consistently used focus, time continued to slip away from me, and before I knew it the sun was about to set once again. Focus had been the major contributor to my increased grinding speed. It only worked when I was using a single skill, but whatever skill I did use was far easier to manipulate and understand, and the experience upgrade helped immensely as well. It had stagnated around level 10 for a while, so I was thinking that it probably had a soft cap at that point and would take a lot longer to level from here going forward.

I wasn’t particularly hungry yet, so I decided to keep working into the night. I had more than enough light to keep working after sunset, as the electricity provided my light source, and there was still a large security lamp outside connected to the Garcia’s store. The lamp used to illuminate the parking lot, but now it lit the training grounds, meaning it was more than possible to work into the night. Donny had just left the forge, and he was now standing in front of one of the punching bags, working on some of his attack skills. I wonder if a punching bag counts as an enemy to level the skill. That made sense to me in a strange way.

Now that I had reached a high level in all of my magic skills, I could focus on their quirks more as I practiced. They each manipulated different elements, but there was a bit more than that. There was a nuance to each of the control skills. To me, lightning focused on strength and directness. You didn’t have a secret lightning attack. It defeated the purpose of the skill altogether. Lightning was meant to stand out, and it was meant to be flashy. Any skills that didn’t reinforce that tended to be more difficult to force.

Water was a different beast altogether. There was a flow to hydrokinesis; each movement needed to shift naturally into the next. It was cool, patient, and supportive. It could be quiet or loud, gentle or forceful. It would allow me to abruptly change speeds, confusing foes, or support myself with healing and entangles on the enemy. That changeability was in its very nature.

Wind was invisible, but always present. It spiraled and moved, and it was all about mass; the more wind you had, the better. When I used aerokinesis, I almost had an ingrained desire to use it in large amounts. It wanted to move and to be moved more than anything else. It was also relentless. Less turbulent than water, but equally unforgiving if you gave it time.

These differences made each of the elements stand out, and once I figured them all out, working with the skills became much easier. I was a storm paraelemental, and these three skills were what would, ideally, make me stand out. Neglecting them was a mistake from the very beginning. I could be a martial artist all I wanted, and I already knew that I would never be a mage, as my personality made the constant study that was required extremely tedious and annoying. If I thought learning these powers was boring, I knew there was no way I could spend three days perfecting a spell circle to cast a single lightning bolt.

That being said, these manipulation powers were a part of me. The fact that each skill ended in ‘kinesis’ meant that I could control them just using my will and a bit of mana. The fact that there was no medium between the skill and myself, and that maxing out aerokinesis gave me physical changes, meant that the skills themselves were an integral part of being an elemental. I’d imagine if I had maxed them out before ranking up, I would have seen some even crazier choices. There was still time before my next rank up, and I would make sure to get as many skills to the max level beforehand so that I could get an awesome evolution.

I went ahead and checked my alerts to see the progress I had made that afternoon.

Skill Alert! Level Up! Status Enhanced!

Class Skills:

Beginner Chaos Body Strengthening – lvl 19 -> 21 – increased regeneration stats while using(+63%)

Magic Skills:

Electrokinesis – lvl 27 -> 39 – can accurately control electricity within a 10ft radius. Can generate attacks at a rate of 1health/1mana expended.

Current Status Increases:

+2 Int

Max status Increases:

+1 Str

+2 Agi

+1 Unassigned

I had also gotten another lightning spell.

Spell Name:

Mana Cost:

Affect:

Duration

Spark

15

Fires a small bolt of electricity (30ft) for +15 damage.

Instant

Lightning Ball

50

Creates a sphere of lightning dealing +10 damage per second in a 10ft area.

20s

Channel Lightning

5/s

Channel a stream of lightning at an enemy. Deals +5 damage per second

n/a

The lightning channel seemed useful actually. Most lightning spells I had seen up to this point had been rather typical, but the lightning channel could be extremely powerful if used correctly. Plus, I’m pretty sure I would look like Emperor Palpatine when I did it, which sounded pretty cool to me.

It was 7:30 pm right now, and I decided that I would keep working until I had maxed out electrokinesis. If I was going to be experiencing extreme pain when I went to sleep tonight, I would only have to do it once.

I went inside to get a snack to tide me over, then headed right back out to get working again. Donny joined me as it went. It seemed like he was burning the midnight oil with me as well, working to get his class skills maxed out so he could go pick up a combat class next. Both of us had rare classes, so it naturally took more to get it done. Kaitlyn had been gone for quite some time exploring the city, but I imagined that she was probably reaching the end of her class soon. From everyone I had checked with, rare classes had better skills but took an extremely long time to max out. Considering all of the madness that my class had brought, that made perfect sense to me.

I liked working on the ultimate skills for the classes, and it always challenged me in new ways when I did. At this point, it took only an extremely minimal amount of mana to sustain balls of electricity hovering around me. My idea was to make a form of reactive armor. I had an AOE attack spell, a single target breaching spell, and there was only one major staple I was missing for the build I was going for. That was a thorn spell.

Because I was going for a close-quarters warrior as my major build, I knew that I would always have the advantage in a 1 vs. 1 situation. What I needed was something to make sure that when I fought large amounts of weaker enemies, I could wipe them out, or at the very least give myself enough space to single them out and kill them one by one. At the very least, these skills would give me a security blanket, allowing me to take on more difficult and dangerous situations without wasting all of my mana to my storm aspect skill. Storm aspect was immensely powerful but losing all mana right after casting it left me vulnerable to attack and kept me from healing. Not a good idea in most situations. With the orc camp, I could simply run away if things went wrong. Inside a dungeon though? I didn’t like the odds that I would be able to just escape from every encounter.

I needed something that would cost virtually no mana to maintain but would punish anyone that came too close. My solution was to create a rapidly spinning hula-hoop of lightning orbs. I had already figured out that simply maintaining an orb of electricity took virtually no mana, so it was naturally what I went to create this spell. There would be five of them in total, and I would cram as much lightning mana into them as I could manage before feeling that headache. I would set them spinning about five feet out from me, and when they hit something, they would zap them, dealing damage equal to 1/5 of the mana I had crammed into the spell. It also gave me quite a bit of variety, because I could subtly change the rotation of the lightning balls, keeping enemies on their toes, or throw the orbs out to the edge of my range, dealing damage that way.

While the lightning spell wasn’t particularly lethal when compared to my wind blade, that was not the intention. Virtually all beings avoided being harmed, and these would provide cover for me, damaging any monsters that decided to get too close. If the monsters were keeping their distance, I could rush them and destroy them one by one using my other skills.

With my plan for my ultimate lightning attack made, I could continue the grind to max lightning manipulation level. While the pain in the future was daunting, the benefits that the transformation could have filled me with excitement. I was almost there.