After the modifier class, they had to go to their pre-lunch physical conditioning. Unsurprisingly, it was way worse than the first time, considering Caeden was still feeling the ache from the first time around. They were run through the same opening set of warm-up exercises, but everything after that was switched up to hit different muscle groups. The infused water helped recover his stamina all over again, but now he had even more aching muscles. Caeden had a sneaking suspicion that after the night session, every single muscle he had would get this treatment.

Caeden was too pleased to be more than vaguely worried about it. He had found a method to get practically infinite shroud! That created a massive advantage for him in more prolonged battles. Now, if he could just figure out a way to do the same with Physical Enhancement…

He discussed what he had found out with Erik and Lily over lunch. He had decided to get a simple turkey sandwich with lettuce and mustard so that he could eat quickly. Lily ended up borrowing his help again to get herself a plate of pan-seared cod with steamed asparagus, and Erik had over a dozen tacos.

“...So if I can scale it up, the cumulative gains should let me recover my loses.” He finished explaining. This was mostly for Lily, as he had already told Erik the whole idea.

“Can you actually do that? Scale it up, I mean.” Lily asked. “It sounds like a lot of delicate control work. Doing that in a classroom is good but in combat… I feel like you’re going to divert too much of your attention. You could end up hurting yourself instead of gaining an advantage.”

Caeden sat back in his chair, staring up at the ceiling of the cafeteria. He slowed down his thinking. “You’re right, of course. It’s not something I can implement any time soon. Hell, it’s nothing more than an idea right now. First, I’ll have to see if I can scale it up like you said. Right now, the efficiency is hilariously close to zero. I barely make back what I spend.” He nodded, feeling a little embarrassed. “I think I was just excited that I came up with something so useful.”

“Actually,” Lily smiled half-heartedly. “The Kines family is famous for doing something similar. Their family specializes in manipulating kinetic energy. They use their Force shroud to absorb the rebound from their shroud hitting itself.”

“Damn,” Caeden slouched. “I should have figured someone else came up with the idea already. Of course they would; it’s such an obvious advantage. Who wouldn’t try to find a way to make it work?”

“I think it's pretty impressive that you came up with it yourself,” Lily commented, cutting into a piece of asparagus. “I feel like I should mention that their family is famous for it because it's famously difficult. Only some shrouds can do it. The level of skill involved is much, much higher than other family’s signature techniques.”

“What’s your family’s technique?” Erik looked up from his tacos. “Your family is a big deal too, right?”

“Yeah, they are,” Lily sighed. “My family’s signature is called the ‘Island Breaker’. You make a massive storm, so large it becomes self-sustaining. It rages for weeks, even months. It’ll literally take on a life of its own, a living storm that refuses to die. It's designed to break the will of people living on it. Crops are ravaged, and infrastructure like roads and bridges get wiped out. It’s a horrifying thing to witness.” She finished in a whisper.

“...Did you?” Caeden couldn’t help but ask.

Lily nodded. “I’ve seen my father do it several times.”

“And you had to go on the island?”

“Father thought it would be good ‘character building’ for us.” Lily threw air quotes around the words.

They were rapidly approaching the time they would have to leave for the next class. Caeden wished he could say something to commiserate with Lily, but it sounded like she had had a harder life than he had, even with the loss of his adoptive parents. Even Erik’s life had been much harder than his, considering the number of near-death experiences he experienced regularly.

They were with Lily for their last class of the day before the final bout of physical conditioning. In between then and now were two more classes, Caeden and Erik had aura and infusion, and Lily had a free period followed by aura.

“Maybe I should ask if I can get my class moved.” Lily wondered. “The other is a free period. I don’t think it would be that big a deal.”

“You can try. They seem to want to give us a lot of personal freedom. I had figured a military academy would be harsh, but it's been very friendly so far.”

“Maybe I can look into some stuff in the library during my free period. I’ve been wondering about a couple of things too. My father was incredibly tight-lipped about his time here.”

“That would be helpful.” Caeden nodded. So Lily headed off to look into the school’s history and teaching philosophy, while Caeden and Erik went to learn about how to use their auras better.

This class was in the Core section of the Mess again. Despite that, Caeden was pretty sure it was in a completely different part of the building from their general education class. He couldn’t be sure; the layout was too confusing. This class was set up similar to their first one, lots of seats set in elevating half-circles. This class was also full. They weren’t the last to enter, but the guy who was, took the last seat.

With that many people, easily over a hundred, in one room, it got loud. That ended up making the teacher’s entrance that much more impactful. She walked in the front door until she was in the front of the room. Then she clapped her hands. It was like the opposite of the trick that the headmaster had pulled at orientation. The whole room covered their ears as the sound of that clap grew into an overwhelming endless wave of sound that rattled Caeden’s teeth and made him feel like his eyeballs were going to liquidize.

“Welcome to aura control. My name is Samantha Soarise. This class will be a constant for you, like infusion control and invasion practice. Each year we will be adding new techniques for you to learn and expand your capabilities.”

Samantha had a powerful presence, which was enhanced by a no-nonsense tone in her voice. She was tall, taller than Caeden at least. He would guess she was approaching seven feet. She had an hourglass figure that her school robe, the same as the students, couldn’t hide. Her long brown hair was actually a lighter shade than her skin, something Caeden had never seen before. She also appeared to have an arm made of black glass or some other reflective substance.

“This year, we will be focusing on the basics. To start with, aura sense. One of the most important aspects of aura. Proper use of the extrasensory abilities you hold as an aura user will eventually make you nearly impossible to ambush, as well as allow you to see and hear at far greater distances and in much greater detail. Today, we’ll be working on how to focus your senses on a particular location to gain a greater depth of information.” Samantha snapped her fingers, surrounding them in her shroud, a green liquid with white ripples pulsing through it. She then made a flinging gesture, and that green-white ball flung to the center of the floor in front of the seats. “I want all of you to try and hear the sound stored in my shroud. If you think you can tell what it is, please raise your hand. While you attempt to do so, I’ll walk you through some basic exercises that should help.”

Caeden was surprised at how straightforward this was. He quickly focused back on his aura senses that he had developed working with Erik on the War God. This wasn’t the way they had been using it at that time, but the principle was the same. With his eyes closed and all his focus extending out around him, Caeden almost felt like his consciousness was separated from his body.

The first thing he noticed was the weight of all the other auras in the room. Over the past few weeks, the presence of other shrouded had become so familiar to him that it barely registered, even with a hundred or more in a room with him. Now that he was focusing on his aura senses though, that crushing pressure was back. Luckily, Caeden was much more adept at dealing with it, so he could just shrug it off.

Next, he focused on observing his immediate surroundings, not with his physical senses but through his shroud. His aura didn’t have ears or eyes, so the way it conveyed information felt different. Essentially, it dropped information into his head wholesale. There was no hearing sounds; he just knew they were occurring. In fact, using the knowledge he had gained from the last class, Caeden understood how this worked much better.

His shroud could interpret every aspect of the world easily. In the same way that he had been able to distinguish the sharpness of the knife he held, his shroud registered every other fundamental detail. He could feel the weight of gravity and accurately measure the temperature of the air. If he focused hard enough, he could even inspect individual elements, and his shroud conveyed their meaning to him. It just understood.

When his shroud encountered soundwaves, Caeden didn’t have to interpret that. His aura sense just automatically informed him of what those waves would sound like to his ears. The same thing happened with light. Caeden could see without opening his eyes because his aura sense organized all the light waves in the room into a cohesive image for his mind to view.

Caeden once again recognized how much he had been underutilizing this ability. Aura sense was such an overwhelmingly massive source of information that he wasn’t even sure where to begin. He deeply regretted not using this for forging. It would have made monitoring the condition of his work so much easier.

As he delved into the world around him, his shroud registered Samantha’s voice, walking the class through the same steps Caeden had just taken. To almost separate the consciousness from the body and move it into the aura, increasing the depth of information that could be observed. It was a meditative experience, feeling the infinite multitudes of changes and phenomena occurring all around him, every single second.

Finally, he focused on the task the class had been given. Directing his attention to the center of the room, he observed the ball of Samantha’s shroud that still hovered over the floor. Interacting with it through his aura was interesting. He had found the challenge of this exercise. Attempting to move his perception, move his aura, through that ball was impossible. It completely blocked his perception.

His first attempt at solving the puzzle was to try and force his aura through the shroud, but he discovered that aura sense had no force. He wasn’t manifesting his shroud, so this passive perception couldn’t affect the ball. With that in mind, Caeden set out to find a way around the barrier. He figured that if the focus today was on aura sense, he had to be able to get inside that ball with just aura sense.

Unfortunately, he found nothing. Running his perception over every square inch of the ball’s surface just confirmed to him that it was solid and blocked his senses. He was stumped. Caeden took a metaphorical step back, wondering what he was missing. Something about his aura sense that he didn’t understand, or something about how shrouds fundamentally worked that he had missed.

He wasn’t the most experienced with shrouds in general, after all. He’d only seen two shrouds go up against each other twice. Once with Lily’s asshole brother, which he remembered mostly as a lot of pain, and the other in general education class this morning. Remembering that fight between Erik and Brendan got him thinking. When Erik had gone on the offensive, invading Brendan’s shroud, he had done so by finding slight flaws in that shield. Maybe a similar approach could be applied here. Caeden narrowed his focus down to a point, shrinking and refining his perception to cover an ever-smaller area.

Smaller.

Smaller.

He was swimming in a soup of fundamental particles, his view of the world so small and alien as to be incomprehensible. If his aura sense weren't automatically interpreting his surroundings, he would be lost. His body felt distant, immaterial. With his perception this small and refined, he could observe the most minor aspects of the shroud ball. It really did superficially resemble water, with little microscopic eddies and currents along its surface.

Observing those currents, he noticed that they all seemed to flow in a particular direction. Hoping he was onto something, Caeden directed his perception to follow the course of those currents to their endpoint. It took a while. Moving his perception when he was covering this small an area was mentally intensive. Caeden felt like he was trying to pick up individual grains of sand off the ground while walking at full speed.

Finally, he came across the solution to this puzzle. Where the currents all met was a small hole. The opening was barely the size of a single-celled organism. If he hadn’t narrowed his perception down this small, it would have passed right over it. In fact, it had earlier when he had inspected the entire sphere.

Slipping his perception inside, Caeden found a sound wave bouncing around inside the hollow ball. A simple series of words. It couldn't escape through the single hole, too small for even a sound wave. Caeden quickly allowed his aura to interpret the sound and returned his perception to his body. Or tried to. He felt so disconnected that it was difficult to find his way back. Feeling deeply disturbed. Caeden took his perception back through the hole, and he felt his body once more. Somehow, the shroud ball had cut off his ability to return his conscious mind to his body, which was all kinds of creepy.

Despite that, he still felt a deep sense of success and accomplishment. Caeden opened his eyes, mind firmly back in his body, and raised his hand.

“Yes?” Samantha acknowledged him after a moment.

“Congratulations on your success,” Caeden stated confidently.

Samantha’s face broke into a genuine smile. “Congratulations indeed. It looks like we have our winner.”