Chapter Nine

Sparring Session

Michal Frits POV

It has been seven months since Adam asked me to train -which had surprised me more than I could fathom. Like he was barely five and was asking me to help him train in fighting and magic- and the results were incredible. Incredibly lackluster, that is. In the last several months, Adam was only able to learn one more spell. Still, some condolence was that he had expanded on his burst spell, and here I am waiting to help him train again today.

It was weird how quickly he was able to make progress on the burst spell, considering the lackluster progress he was making in learning new spells. It wasn't anything too incredible, but it was still progress.

He was now able to give himself a burst of speed with the burst spell. He had to be moving before he cast the spell, and it only gave him a slight push. At the same time, I could use that spell to launch myself above a two-story building when I used it at my full power, and I wasn't even a wind mage. I WAS AN EARTH MAGE.

It was crazy to think about how hard it was for him to progress even after being the earlies to awaken that I knew of. Realizing that I was being deprecating, I tried to steer my thoughts away and was partially successful. Instead, I tried to focus on what Adam had done well over the last few months.

While being slightly behind, he was still well ahead of the curve when it came to magic use, but what he was truly ahead of the game in was magic knowledge. While most people knew the basics, such as mana powering spells, and that each person had an affinity towards a specific element. While that is common knowledge, Adam thought into it a little more; he tried to think about why people had certain affinities.

Throughout this, I realized two things. One Adam is weirdly intelligent, not just smart for his age; he is smart in general. It's not that he has absurd amounts of knowledge stored in his head… at least not that I know of, but instead, it's his way of thinking about things. He can solve problems in a weirdly complicated way that is also surprisingly efficient. The second thing I realized was that Adam was right about ascertaining somebody's affinity by things that they understand more. Such as, somebody who has lived by water their whole life knows more about how water flows. That person would most likely be a water mage.

When Adam first awakened, I checked him to see what affinity he was, and I saw that he was relatively balanced apart from one type of mana that I had never seen before. His wind was the highest out of the types of mana that I had seen before at about twenty-five percent of his total mana after that was water at about ten, then earth around ten again, and lastly, there was his fire around five percent. There was also around fifty percent of his mana dedicated to the one unknown type of mana, but I believed that it was just a section of his mana that would spread out into different elements as he grows. Similar to one's baby teeth, they have them when young, but as they reach maturity, they lose them and replace them for one's adult teeth.

I finally saw Adam open our back door and walk out into the yard before sluggishly asking, "What do I have to do first."

Adam Fritz POV

My father looked at me, slightly annoyed after I had asked what we were going to do before responding with a question of his own.

"You took a minute to get out here."

Slightly irritated that he expected me to be out of the house right after sunrise to get my training in, I snipped, "Well, sorry for wanting to sleep." This seemed to irritate him even more because he just scoffed, mumbling something about being too attitudey for someone who isn't even six yet before telling me to warm up.

Begrudgingly I started stretching. I went down to touch my toes, keeping my knees relatively straight, and began the count to ten in my head. I went through this process with a few more stretches before finally getting warmed up and asking, "Ok, what should I do next."

Surprisingly my father said, "I'm sorry for getting angry bud. I am super tired. I had a long week at work amongst other things."

"It's ok," I responded in a faint voice. If I'm being honest, I was frustrated also. I had been at this whole magic thing for several months now, and I still can't grasp how people can use magic so proficiently. Around a month after I had awakened, I learned how to look at the mana in my body and be able to tell what element it originated from, but for some reason, it seemed like half of my mana was blocked off.

I have constantly been trying to find a way to unlock the rest of my mana, but I still can't figure out how to use that half of my mana. Almost as if he could read my thoughts to see when I ended my internal silique, he said, "Next, do you want to do some sword sparring?"

Hearing that I could use swords, I excitedly responded, "Yeah. I wanna do sparing."

"Well I'm glad that you are excited for some sparing atleast," my father quipped.

After messing with each other talking about who would be the one to win the sparring match, I bolted inside to grab the swords. Unsurprisingly whenever I passed my mother's room, she was still asleep. Realizing that, I slowed down my run into a walk in order not to wake her. I swear she will wake up to anything. One time when I was around two, I tried to sneak out of my room and read in her study. I thought that I was being completely silent, but when I was about five feet from the study door, she walked out of her room and scooped me up, and before putting me into bed, mumbled something about me being too rowdy at night even though I had been silent.

After grabbing the swords out of the closet, I closed it and walked past my mom's room to see her coming out in her nightclothes before bleary-eyed asking me, "What are you doing so early?"

Figuring that she was still mostly asleep, I said, "Nothing I'm just training with dad, we are about to spar. You can head back to sleep if you want."

Surprisingly she responded, still bleary-eyed, "No im going to make myself a cup of coffee and watch you two from the window."

After hearing that, she would watch that lightened my mood to the point where I joked, "Look forward to me taking down the all-mighty dad," in a stupid voice.

To that, my mother only chuckled before excusing herself to go get her morning cup of coffee, leaving me running out of the house back to dad so we could get started with our sparring.

Confused, he asked me why it took so long, and I gave him a lengthy explanation about my conversation with mom. After talking a bit more and my dad giving me some pointer on mana manipulation, we each took a sword and moved away from each other.

I was standing around twenty feet from my father, who was staring behind me and waving towards the house. Curious about what he was waving at, I checked over my shoulder and saw my mom sitting at the open window looking out into the yard at my father and me.

I turned around to see my father getting into a ready stance with his feet just about shoulder with, and his hands gripped around the sword not too tightly but not holding it so lightly that it would fall out of his grasp.

I got into my stance as well after seeing my fathers before he asked me, "Are you ready. I'm not going to go easy on you."

"I know your not. Let's go."

"Ok. On three."

"One"

"Two"

"Three"

After his count, both my father and I exploded forward with explosive speed. His speed came from where he made a slight divot with earth magic to push out of and myself using my improved burst spell on top of pushing with mana enhanced legs.

The world seemed to move in slow motion as I neared my father. Our swords were about a foot away from each other when I saw his foot pivot to the left. Almost instantly, I had four different scenarios speeding through my brain, him making a slightly different move each time, but they all had something in common; he would take a quick step to the left and swing at a horizontal because it would open him up too much if he did a vertical slash.

Whenever he made his step to the left, I jumped into the air assisted by burst and the mana in my legs to the point where my feet were around two meters above my father's head. He calmly tracked my movement into the air with practiced ease. That was until I activated burst again to come speeding towards him in an attack that I could only hope that he wasn't expecting.

When I activated burst, my father's face twitched just the slightest bit, proving that he indeed was not expecting me to launch myself at him like a missile. With time still feeling slowed down, I flew at my father, who now didn't have enough time to full doge, and made the decision to attempt a parry on my wooden blade.

Just as our swords collided, time seemed to catch up with itself. Everything was back to moving at its normal speed, I was able to hear all of the things that I had toned out earlier, I could feel my breaths pushing and pulling in, and out of my chest, I could feel the ground beneath my feet, but most importantly I could see the crack spanning the length of my father's sword.

After seeing that, I made up my mind and began my attack. While I wasn't bad with a sword, it appeared that my father was just barely better than me. For every attack that I launched, he would counter.

Trying to get around his guard, I let up my attack for only a moment, then launched myself at him again with burst. While doing so, I felt that somehow I had progressed the spell a bit. When I was close enough to properly attack, I took a step forward and to the left in a half lunge aiming for one of two things to happen. One to be able to strike my father and end the sparring session like that, or for him to block my sword. While that may sound counter-intuitive, I knew it would only take one more attack for his sword to break.

Just as my sword was about to strike my father's right side, he curved his body into a "C" shape. Seeing that he had opened himself up to a sweep from the side, I took my sword and pushed it with burst towards his side, moving in from where it already was by his side from my previous thrust. In a lightning-quick move, he was able to move his sword down to his right side and block my blade, but I had thought correct, and his sword broke whenever mine connected with his. The one thing I didn't expect was for my sword to keep going and strike my father in the side, sending him tumbling about five feet.

Immediately I dropped my own weapon and rushed to my father's side to check on him. Hurriedly I asked him, "Are you ok dad?!" To this, he only chuckled and said back, "You got me good on that one didn't ya you little bugger."

He grabbed my head after he said that and ruffled my hair, saying nice job. After that, though, he asked, "Did you get better at your burst spell. I wasn't expecting you to be able to push the back of your hand to give your sword speed with it, and I didn't think you could do that yet at all."

"Yeah for some reason I just felt like it would work this time I don't know why though."

Somehow I didn't notice her running towards my father and me till she was right on top of us. Concerned, my mother asked my father if he was ok, and he gave back his usual smart-ass response of how he is always ok. After that, My mother said, "How about we take a break from this and I make you two some breakfast."

Both my father and I nodded our heads, causing all three of us to laugh at the similarities between my father and me. The three of us made our way to the kitchen, and all helped make breakfast that morning, and overall having a wonderful day spending time with each other.