Derek quickly donned the training armor and dragged the weapons stand out onto the training field. Ovid was waiting for him near one of the training dummies. “Those boys beat you up again, didn’t they?”

Derek nodded, “Yes, master.” Ovid was more than just a simple armsman. Most armsman would be tier zero soldiers. Ovid was a tier five Weapon Master. He was quite possibly the most dangerous man in Redwyrm. Ovid followed Eona to Redwyrm and fought alongside Jared in the battle that took his life. His personal loyalty to Eona and the wish of a dying man secured Derek’s place as his apprentice.

If not for these reasons how could a branch member of a an irrelevant clan acquire such an acclaimed master? If Ovid hadn’t been tied down in Redwyrm there is no telling what tier he would be or how much he would be earning as the Weapon Master for some great hegemon somewhere.

“It is good that you didn’t fight back. We know how underhanded that scumbag father of theirs is. Perseverance and discretion are valuable traits too. You don’t have to ignore these grievances they are piling upon you but you must not let those grievances control your behavior. If anything, use them to motivate you to train harder.”

Derek listened intently to Ovid’s lesson. In this world he had never met his father and this man and the ancient blacksmith were the closest thing to a father he had. They stood as two titans whose backs were targets for him to pursue. Ovid, with his thorough understanding of how to get everything out of every movement in a fight and the old smith with his gruff insistence that the sincerity of the worker was as important as the skill used in the work. Between the two of them, Derek had been raised to be a very forthright and sincere young man.

This day’s practice was with the glaive and warsword, his clan’s favored weapons. The glaive was a slashing weapon. The ones used by the Thornes possessed a two foot long blade on the end of a six foot shaft. The goal was to use the leverage of the polearm to generate as much force as possible on the blade, allowing the blade to cleave through the user's foe. This was important for a clan that specializes in fighting demons because a demon’s thick hide would render the typical three to six inch cutting surface of a weapon almost useless for inflicting killing blows.

The clan’s warswords were patterned after the Thorneblade, the Sword at the heart of Redwyrm. They were essentially short hafted versions of the glaives that were much easier to use than the clan’s heavy glaives due to the weight being closer to the hand but the weight was still much greater than typical single bladed swords.

The Thorne Clan passed down forms for use with both weapons for thousands of years and Ovid learned those forms years ago and improved them before teaching them to Derek. These improved forms had modifications that made them more useful both when facing larger enemies like demons and when fighting people.

Ovid’s genius was quite evident in these changes, the greatest weakness of these forms was how poorly they work against agile human beings and the changes he had made had largely mitigated that. Also evident in these modifications was his confidence in his student, the changes would be impossible to learn for someone who hadn’t achieved mastery in the weapons already.

Derek trained until supper time when he and Ovid cleaned themselves up before sitting down to eat with his mother, grandmother, and Alicia. The twins had already gone home to the keep of Redwyrm Castle where the primary family of the main clan resided to eat with the Patriarch and their family.

After dinner, Derek laid his head in his mother's lap and listened to her lecture and quiz her apprentice in magic and rune theory.

“What effect does elemental affinity have on schema creation? Be thorough in your answer,” Eona asked Alicia. He could sense that as she asked this and her fingers played with his hair her magic delved into his body and began adjusting his own runic schema.

She and his grandmother had collaborated in creating his schema. His mother had used her magic to monitor and support his growth even in the womb and her understanding of his schema could even be said to be superior to her understanding of her own. The relationship between the person that designs the schema and the person it is implanted on was almost as important as the level of understanding in schema design.

The effect of a deep relationship between the creator of a schema and the recipient, the deep understanding of the recipient’s body that stems from this, and the innate benefit it grants towards the effectiveness of a schema was called harmony. In fact the more genius the design the more benefit a schema would receive from that harmony. This benefit translates into a stronger schema being implanted into the recipient insuring that the recipient will have a higher growth potential from the schema.

Ever since the day she knew he was forming within her she had monitored his schema and tweaked it whenever it was appropriate. Even though they lived in a humble cottage and sometimes had to make due to survive, the level of care and knowledge that went into maintaining a first grade schema for her son would be enough to make even the most spoiled and wealthy young masters in the world green with envy.

“Runic schema,” Alicia started, “are the magical diagrams used by humans to control the distribution of essence within their bodies. The most basic schema will merely draw some essence towards the basic attributes of strength, body, agility, and mind. They will only be effective in doing this roughly thirty percent of the time with the majority of essence that is accrued being dumped into the essentia pool or randomly assigned to magical attributes used.

“These schema are barely better than not possessing a schema at all and are the work of amateurs. Stronger schema will not only raise the chance that essence will be assigned to all of the basic attributes but will also attempt to assign essence to all of the elemental attributes as well, will promote the speed at which essence is gained, and will delay the so called leveling process until as many attributes as possible have grown that level and the essentia pool has been grown as much as possible but before the essence pool has grown enough to cause a backlash that might cripple the person.

“The elemental attributes are the attributes associated with each of the eight magical attributes; order, water, light, air, chaos, fire, darkness, and earth. These attributes are affected by the affinity that the person has for that element, with stronger affinity making the schema stronger for that attribute while weaker affinity has the opposite effect. When schema are applied, both the affinity of the person receiving the schema and the affinity of the person applying it will affect the final results.

“Elemental attributes have a further effect when designing more advanced schema. The basic schema merely utilize the attributes the creator is strong in to lay the arcane diagram out. These do not take into account the ways in which certain elements synergize with each other, the ways in which the elements promote the basic attributes, or the ways a strong weave of elements can provide a foundation that allows a larger and stronger essentia pool to be created.

“For example, earth attribute can be used to enhance the part of the schema that draws essence to the body attribute, or can combine with order attribute to enhance the part of the schema that draws essence to the order attribute. Fire can be used in the same way to promote strength and chaos attribute and so on. Using supporting elemental attributes can raise the rate of success for the accrual of essence in an attribute tremendously higher and since an attribute may only attain one essence per level and the essentia pool has a chance of crippling the user if it grows too much each level it is important to make sure that every attribute has as high a chance to grow with each level as possible.

“This is most important in the earlier tiers when a person’s attributes require less essence to accrue to raise them. In tier zero, the natural tier that all people start in and few ever progress out of, it merely takes one essence to raise an attribute. It takes one additional essence per attribute each tier. Thus, while a person that maximized their essence gain in tier zero might accrue an attribute of ten in mind, for instance, maximizing it in tier one would only have the effect of raising it by five more attribute points, while tier two would only increase by three.

“Missing the earliest attribute gains could have a tremendous effect on maximum growth potential and could potentially stop the individual from progressing in the highest tiers of growth due to insufficient attribute scores. Thus those that design schema must learn to make the most use out of the earliest tiers where essence resistance is the lowest. But a difficult problem arises when attempting to craft a schema at the lowest levels.

“Generally, only so much essence can be accrued per level without endangering the health and potential growth of the person receiving the schema. Furthermore the magical energies of a schema must be limited at lower levels for similar reasons. At the lowest levels of tier zero the body and mind attribute are usually not strong enough to even maximize the growth of the elemental attributes much less the growth of the essence pool.

“Thus, in those first levels it is doubly important to maximize the benefits of supporting elemental attributes and to take as much advantage of harmony as possible to guarantee that in those first levels that at least all of the basic and elemental attributes receive essence. The essentia pool can be left at a lower priority at this point in the schema design as it will have plenty of opportunity for growth later and it doesn’t suffer from the same diminishing returns that the other attributes suffer from.”

As Alicia wrapped up her answer she could see that her mistress was pleased with it and that Derek had fallen asleep while listening, his physical fatigue having gotten the better of him. Eona smiled and beckoned her over, “Very good answer. You will find more ways to use the elements in a schema as you experiment with them.

“Come here and delve Derek. I will guide you and show you the way these concepts are used. This schema uses the synthesis of all I have ever learned of schema creation and my harmony with my son is superior to even my own understanding of my body. Do you see how the elements are woven together to form a base in the essentia pool? And how order and light can supplement earth to produce a stronger and more robust body attribute? These are applications of the concepts you just mentioned.

“Let me show you some examples of more advanced applications. For instance, see how the light and water elements wind around the body attribute in this way and over here at the essentia pool? These allow Derek to heal, recover his stamina, and regenerate mana more rapidly and as more essence is applied, I believe this ability may grow rapid enough to be visible to the naked eye.

“Also, look below his essentia pool. I have created a catch for when too much essence is gathered. Normally this essence will either apply to a part of the schema, potentially harming the host, or it will dissipate back into the world around the host. With this it will be caught into a reserve which will wait for a tier up before releasing this essence....”

Alicia was excited to view her mistress’ handiwork. Eona was truly an unparalleled genius in this field and Derek’s schema was her masterpiece. Alicia never regretted coming to this backwoods place because she knew that she would find no better teacher in any of the large cities. Delving into Derek’s schema enabled her to see these concepts applied. She also enjoyed the intimate feeling she got when immersed in it. That feeling was entirely different from the one she felt when she delved her own. The lesson continued for a while longer before Eona sent her and Derek off to bed.