“Mason,” she said in her sweet and level voice.

He snapped out of the daze he had been in, trying to think about the best ways he could level his skills now that he realized how important it was to do so. “What? I mean, yeah? Yes, Faynel?” he stuttered as he tried to balance between familiarity and formality.

“You wanted me to teach you how runes and enchantments work, right?” She smiled as she asked, but her face was twisted subtly. Mason would have missed it but he was exceptionally focused on her at the moment. Something in her tone threw him off.

“Yeah, of course. Especially if it’ll raise my skill levels just like that.”

“Then hit me.” She jumped backwards several feet and crouched slightly like she was ready to pounce. She didn’t touch the thin sword at her side, just stared across the field at Mason tauntingly.

“I played this game with Torysen and I’m pretty sure I was a hair’s breadth away from being blown away by her,” he muttered. He hadn’t even decided if he should grab his sword or his staff.

“Tory was probably still trying to decide if she wanted to kill you at that point. Luckily for me, she didn’t. I’m not going to be attacking you though. Not seriously, at least,” she explained as she began to circle around him, eying him like dinner. “You should just drop your weapons now. You aren’t skilled enough with them for them to help you in this fight.”

Still hesitant, Mason considered preparing Indiscriminate Force, but remembered his drained mana stores. There was no doubt in his mind that she had planned this. He was beginning to suspect she had planned the whole day from start to finish, judging by how quickly she moved him between surprisingly related activities.

“Alright, but if I’m unarmed, then I’m not going to hold back.” He dropped his gear and began to turn in place to follow her with his eyes.

“Hit me as hard as you can, I’m sure it won’t hurt nearly as much as a punch from a Corrosi,” she taunted.

Mason lunged then, moving quickly for a human, but not nearly quickly enough. By the time he made it within swinging motion of where she had been, she was twice as far away on the opposite side of the circle. He had seen her move, just not quite well enough to follow her or adjust his own momentum.

He took a step toward and she matched him perfectly with a step backwards. When he moved to the left, she moved around him to the right. Every movement he made she matched him like she had predicted his movements. So he started trying to shake her, feinting left and right, lunging forward and then falling back.

The field was still patched with mud from the rain two days prior, so he could feel it caking onto his boots and stiffening around the legs of his pants. It distracted him- how could there still be mud if it was this hot out? He couldn’t remember it raining overnight.

He was shaken from his thoughts by a forceful shove from behind, and he almost went sprawling into a spot of the very mud he had been so fixated by. Even though he had only been thinking about it for a moment, she had somehow seen that weakness and gotten around him.

She was laughing now, and he jumped to his feet and chased after her, pumping his legs as hard as he could while she nearly effortlessly sprinted away. “God damnit how are you so fast?” he complained as she positioned herself the same distance away as earlier in the round.

“You’re not the first to ask that, you know. There’s two very obvious ways to improve yourself in this world. Strengthen yourself naturally through exercise and nutrition and practice. Or you gather Focus Points and let them do the heavy lifting while you push your limits. Either way, you only get better at something by doing it,” she explained, her voice somehow level even though her breathing had picked up.

Without warning, she rushed at Mason, and he just barely threw himself out of the way before she ran headfirst into him. There was no tackle, no dive- she was just going to move right through him. Mason tried to swing around and chase her, but by the time he had gotten himself moving she was off in the distance.

“I was already good at running on Marra, so when we suddenly showed up here and I had dangerous monsters to chase or be chased by, I had plenty of opportunity to increase my speed. Then I got a skill for Haste, which allows me to burn stamina and mana for a speed increase, and I got that up to level 25 for the agility focus point. Then I joined the Roving Band and trained up footwork for another agility focus point.”

Footwork, that was right. He not only had the skill, but he had a challenge for it. He took the first stance as she smiled at him and kept talking.

“I also had a challenge called Agility Superiority. It required me to find some particularly fast opponents and beat them in a fair competition. That just gave me more practice, and more focus points.”

He didn’t respond, but he began moving himself through the steps and stances of the footwork technique he had been shown. It was mostly a combat stance, but surely he could pull something from it worth more than that.

Faynel just watched on, amused. Her opponent was no longer charging her, but if he was going to try something clever, she wasn’t going to prevent him. She moved closer to him and began to follow the steps as well. Where he stumbled and moved clumsily, deep in thought, she moved with an unnatural grace through the motions which made it clear that the steps were ingrained in her.

Mason ignored her at first, instead ensuring that he remembered how each motion moved into the next, and together they moved around the field in a disharmonized unison. Once he had the basic pattern down though, Mason began to watch how she moved.

It was as if she had turned the entire footwork routine into a single motion. She never stopped moving, and anytime one foot was planted the other one was already up. Her balance was impeccable and she seemed to draw power for her motions not from the ground below her, but from the strength that resided purely in her muscles.

Trying to pick up his speed, Mason began to imitate her. He stumbled more often than not, often finding himself awkwardly trying to lift both feet at once, or with an arm out of position and throwing off his center of gravity.

Her instincts let her move through the steps without thinking, so she concentrated closely on his movements even while he tried to mirror hers. To an onlooker, they would seem to be in something halfway between a battle and a dance. She was thrilled though to see her plan coming along perfectly. She had been forbidden to spar with Mason, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t goad him into training himself.

Enticing him into exploring the mysteries of magic, trying to push himself into understanding the possibilities of the mana flowing through his body, and even challenging his understanding of his simplest movements. It could have taken days to get someone less motivated to undertake any of these steps. Shayjol, she remembered, hadn’t cared for the ideas behind strength. He wanted to be taught spells, and wanted to improve his strength with his axe.

Mason wanted to understand things.

Faynel had wished he would have chased her a little longer. She had so many more sneaky tricks to pull on him. But though the exercise would have done him good, he never would have caught her like that. Like this though, running through the paces of the footwork, he might actually really improve himself.

Her thoughts were cut short by a flash of motion and a mild sting on the back of her hand. She looked at her hand first, then up to Mason, and was taken aback by his wide grin. She could see the mana boiling within him, excited and eager and flowing happily.

“I think you owe me an explanation of runes and enchantments,” he said with a voice oozing in self-satisfaction.

“How did you…?” she questioned, still trying to understand what had happened.

“You got distracted by something, which I figured might happen if I got you to do something you had done a hundred times before. As long as I was chasing you, your guard was up. So I stopped.” He shrugged as if it had been almost accidental. Which it had. “I also gained five levels in footwork while watching you.”

“You only got me because I was so used to seeing you stumble and fall that I didn’t react to your lunge!” she finally shouted, realizing she had been beaten.

“Well, yeah.”

Still fuming, Faynel led him to a shelter with a basin of clean water and several long benches to sit at. They sat opposite one another on different benches and drank from their water pouches while she worked up the energy to explain him his reward.

Eventually, she leaned forward and looked him right in the eye, and as she shifted her weight their knees touched. She spoke like she was trying to recite some great secret, and her expression was even more intense than usual.

“All people are born and built of holy mana,” she began with a dramatic air to her voice that faded as she adjusted the speech, “well, except for you of course. And probably most races not from Marra.”

Mason nodded, more interested in the gist of the tale than the details.

“When the first Marrans learned to pull on the holy mana within themselves, each spell came at great cost. A sigilkeeper, as they were called back then, would cut a sigil into the back of their hand in time of great need, and begin to pour their mana through the wound and the crystals in their blood. As the mana passed through the wound, the sigil would glow, and they would form the first embellishments in the air.

“These embellishments were crude, simple things, but they were not without power. The sigilkeeper would then pass through many motions, so that the embellishment would blur and form into a rune above them. Only through great concentration and willpower could these runes be used to transform the holy mana into all kind of effects. It was said the greatest among them could create waves of fire, split the earth, summon beasts from beyond if they could form the runes given to them by the Source”

Mason was enraptured by her telling. Not because it was a particularly good story. In fact, cutting open your hand and doing a dance every time you wanted to cast a spell seemed pretty awful. But the intensity with which Faynel told the story, paired with the rolling of her voice, created a captivating effect.

But then she ruined it because she seemed to forget how the story actually went, which led to her rambling through the rest. “And yeah,” she said nervously while looking up to the ceiling of their shelter, “Eventually we realized that we could weave mana into cloth and leather as our sigils, and we could also create embellishments through a semi-crystallization of mana within objects as well. So for a couple hundred years we would just use enchanted armor to cast spells, until finally some monk up in the mountains somewhere realized that if you just formed the rune using your own mana inside of yourself, you could cast the spell anyways.

“After that the only time people really did the whole sigilkeeper ritual was for, well, rituals, or study. It was sometimes easier to create new runes through the sigil dances, but not always. Then there were like a hundred branches of study and colleges formed that all insisted their way was right, and eventually people stopped caring anyways because why cast a spell when a mana expert could imbue an enchantment into an object which would allow anyone to activate it with just a small burst of mana.

“Plus, my grandmother swears that all of this is pointless. She uses an entirely different form of spell-casting that the colleges considers too dangerous to teach, but I am not going into those politics right now. You’ll learn about that pretty soon though.”

Mason looked at her skeptically. This explained why Leornal was an accountant, he guessed. Their world really knew how to take the awe and wonder out of magic. “But then why did that shop even sell all those enchantments anyways? What did they do?”

“Oh, that!” Faynel seemed to remember that her rambling explanation really didn’t explain anything at all. “So embellishments and sigils are still useful, though they’re pretty often used just for decoration. If you use a lot of force magic, you can use certain force sigils to either enhance your power or alter the effects of your rune. And a really good enchanter can put different effects directly into an object, like boots that make you run faster, or a knife that naturally conducts mana so it can be sharper.”

“Oh, like this!” Mason opened up his pack and pulled out a sheathed blade that Leornal had given him after one of their fights in that strange city. He pulled it from its sheathe and handed it hilt first to Faynel.

“Where did you get this, Mason?” She looked genuinely surprised. “This is a pretty valuable sword. I don’t even know what metal it is, and that rune on it looks awfully complex.”

“I think we found it buried and protected by some female soul-bound yeti looking monster?” Mason said, uncertain. He had actually forgotten about it.

“I get the feeling you humans come with some special luck ability. Between this and your staff, if you had any actual skill you’d be a pretty scary fighter. Anyways,” she continued, “runes and enchantments are great. Since you already have a rune, try to figure out what the sigil and the embellishment it’s connected to look like, and you’ll be able to do a lot more with your spell. Just be careful not to start studying any new runes. Your force rune is special, so we need to make sure you keep learning only those special ones.”

“Are you serious?” Mason asked, suddenly annoyed. “That was the great reward I got for managing to hit you? All day you’ve been tricking me into learning stuff that shot all my skill levels up, and now you’re just going to tell me that, ‘hey everything is connected and you’ll get better if you study.’ This reward sucks.”

“Well what did you expect? You cheated anyways so I’m cheating you for your reward. And we’ll be training together every day so it’s not like you actually needed to see anymore instant gains.”