I sat on the floor my back resting on a wall that was surprisingly warm considering the weather.

As I sat I traced my hand over one of the multiple human engravings on the wall which all emitted this faint energy I seemed to notice more and more every day.

In my view stood a cacophony of different people but two stood out in particular standing in the center of the small crowd.

One staring daggers straight into the soul of the other while one calmly stands with a smile on his face hiding a bored expression.

It was late in the afternoon. Two weeks after I had lost my bet with Kent when a new opportunity arose for me to observe my teacher’s fighting skills.

The air was still humid from the rain. It had been pouring since about eight in the mourning which gave the entire house this calm and tired feeling.

That mixed with the pain and stress from the near-constant lessons and personal training I had been going through since my evolution almost made me fall asleep right where I was sitting down.

Hell just before I got down here I was performing dual sword drills until my hands and legs were sore.

I was beyond exhausted but this was just too great of an opportunity to give up on.

Rina stood like a statue taking in deep long breaths while forcing the mana within her body into her staff.

A thick mass of glowing energy flowed like a liquid ball at the top of her staff constantly folding and smashing into itself becoming denser and denser over time.

Complex engraving weakly glowed along the staff and if one looked closely at the orb of flowing water they would see that it wasn't just crashing into itself randomly but lines of liquid mana were neatly interlocking and fusing themselves together in the center of the orb in ornate detail.

The light produced by the tree at the center of the room mixed with the glow coming from the magic Rina was casting making for a truly mystical sight.

Rina opened her eyes which glowed light purple as the ball of energy she was forming became more and more unstable deforming as though there was a raging beast trying to push itself out of an inflated rubber balloon.

Without any ceremony, the whole thing silently popped sending small shock waves around the room as the liquid mana fell onto the floor like molten iron.

The thick liquid spread across the floor and then began to evaporate rapidly into a light blue and black mist which dissipated into the air with no discernible smell.

Rina collapsed onto the ground her breath was ragged and beads of sweat poured down her face.

This proved to me that mana wasn't an utterly mystical force but was actually something that was governed by some of the laws of physics, namely diffusion.

A substance at a higher concentration will move into a lower concentration along a concentration gradient.

This was one of the fundamental proofs of the particulate theory of matter something that remembered like the back of my hand as I was required to take a chemistry course as a part of my degree.

The important thing to note was that on some level mana was a form of matter, a strange form of matter, but matter nonetheless or at least it probably was.

Otherwise, we would not see spread around the room when it became a gas.

Summoning a creature had four distinct stages:

The Gaseous Stage - Where the gas-like mana would be pushed into the shape of a ball.

The Condensation Stage - Where said mana would begin to compress, condensate, and gradually become liquid.

The Solid Stage - The liquid would continue to condense further until it finally became a solid ball.

The Awakening Stage - Where the solid ball of mana would begin to form into the shape of the desired creature, a mental link would then form allowing the caster to control their minion manually.

Rina failed just at the end of the solidification stage which meant she had almost completed a minor today on her first try which was beyond amazing for a novice.

Speaking of amazing feats, our teacher Kent when he first showed off summoning skipped straight from the gaseous stage all the way to the awakening stage effortlessly. A feat that I didn’t even know I should have been impressed by until recently.

I was already glad that I choose to observe this process today instead of just practicing in my room by myself or sleeping off a bit of my fatigue.

I took out an empty notebook and began to write down some important headings.

The original reason I came here today was to be able to see how Kent fought from a third-party perspective and to hopefully get some useful notes on him for our next battle.

Rina got up from the floor and again started to charge up mana into the staff gathering the purple gas which formed itself into strange shapes which almost seemed like the letters of an ancient language.

These shapes moved next to each other until they formed purple rings around a center core that eventually began to condensate into a liquid but which soon collapsed similar to the last one.

After two other failed attempts at summoning a creature and about thirty minutes of intense concentration, she finally managed to form the liquid mana into a solid ball shaping it into a smaller purple version of the slime that Kent managed to summon during his demonstrations.

All of the maids who were off shift at the time and watching the match were awed by this.

“Wow, to think that after two months of training alone you would already be able to complete a summon. I'm genuinely impressed I have never seen such a thing in all my years of teaching” Kent exclaimed as he moved into his fighting stance.

The slime just dropped to the floor with a loud splat.

Rina stood still and didn't respond to anything. It became clear that by completing her first summon she had finally unlocked the Summoning Weapon Proficiency Skill.

This was the first time that I actually saw someone learn a skill right in front of my eyes.

Rina’s Iris turned golden as words and images flashed through her mind and strange sensations filled her body in quick succession.

As the process happened, from the outside perspective it almost looked like she was frozen in time as light golden particles flowed around her.

Once it was over she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and stood there processing what she had just learned.

A luxury I was not afforded when I unlocked my first melee skills as I was immediately knocked unconscious by a hit to the head.

Skills in this world didn't exactly work the way I imagined them to from my years of experience with web and light novels.

In a video game if you wanted to level up a skill you either needed to provide certain resources in the form of gold or a skill point to level up or you would need to use the skill a certain amount of times in total for you to get it to level up.

In comparison the acquisition of new skills or new skill evolutions made you feel as though you had just quickly skimmed through a massive training manual.

You would get a general idea of the topic but most of the information would be lost to you if you even understood it in the first place.

Each level up after that felt as though it was just filling in the gaps left by your original skimming of the information.

Only when one came to their own epiphanies and reached new levels of their own understanding would the system reward one with a level up.

Which in truth just solidified what you yourself already learned and helped to quicken your acquisition of muscle memory while giving you minor insights and directions to move forward in.

This made skill acquisition and leveling a very active process one couldnt just simply swing their sword one thousand times and expect to gain amazing sword skills you actually needed to understand what you were doing and think deeply as to why.

This made skills feel both artificial yet extremely organic.

Rina opened her eyes and took a deep breath and smiled from ear to ear an expression that was rare for her to have and readied a stance for her to begin their practice match.

I steered closely at Kent to see how he would respond grabbing my pen and notebook ready to mark down anything I saw that was useful.

Rina without saying anything to our teacher or the maids around her quickly commanded the slime she summoned to attack Kent.

Immediately after she commanded her minion, she dashed to where Kent was to hit him in the head with her staff.

Kent effortlessly hit the slime away with his wooden sword then parried away the staff aimed at his jaw.

Rina didn’t back down but continued to add pressure, she stabbed her staff forward trying to hit a weak point in the body like the neck or stomach taking advantage of her longer reach than Kent to hit him without putting herself in danger.

Whenever her staff was parried away by Kent she would use the break in the combat to command her minion to attack Kent though her minion was used more as a distraction than anything else.

She would wait for her slow slime to reach her opponent before quickly delivering an attack of her own.

After about fifteen minutes into the battle where she got more and more accustomed to using her minion, she began to attack in a pattern of ten attacks from her then one attack from her minion instead of waiting for a natural break in the combat to order him around.

I had already learned a lot and surprisingly it wasn't from observing Kent but from observing Rina herself.

I didn't really think about it before but when I fought Kent the first time, I would try an attack, get countered, move back, or more likely get hit back before stopping to think about my next move and attacking again.

In retrospect, this was an extremely dumb way of fighting.

If I was in a real battle with someone else they more than likely wouldn’t give me the breathing room to sit back and think of a plan and it also gave Kent more time to relax and counter my attacks.

Rina on the other hand was relentless layering attack after attack without really thinking about them and more importantly without giving Kent any time to think as well.

Despite her lackluster movements and form her attacks were still extremely effective (at least relative to mine) because she came up with the strategy of using her superior reach to her advantage before the fight even began changing up her plan to include her minion long after the fight was already underway.

Using reach to her advantage was also an incredibly obvious thing to do but I was so caught up in sword combat that I hadn’t even considered using a weapon with more reach.

I could only imagine how effective her strategy would be if it were performed with an appropriate weapon like a spear, a pike, or a halberd with the proper skills and footwork to match.

Pole weapons were greatly underrated in fiction but even something like a chain and sickle would be amazing here in this particular “just get a hit in” situation.

I was embarrassed that despite learning to use multiple melee weapons I didn’t even consider matching the weapon to the particular problem I was faced with which really opened my eyes.

Again all of these realizations were super obvious things I should have gotten in the beginning.

Another lesson learned was to calm down and think my decisions through more clearly moving forward while not rushing just because I had a time limit. It wasn't normal for me to be this tunnel-visioned on something.

She continued to stagger her pattern of attack both with her staff and her minion until she was dripping with sweat and her minion had half dissipated into that blue and black gas.

As a final hurrah, until she had to stop fighting, she forced the rest of her stamina into her legs doing a mini dash like the one I did multiple times during my fight with Kent previously shocking him to the core almost allowing her to get a clean hit off.

Kent as always recovered gracefully before he was hit tapping her staff away. Rina after this lowered her staff in defeat and walked away.

“That was amazing Rina!” one of the maids ran up to her patting her head.

“To think that you would already be able to use sprint in short bursts and at such a young age too!” another commented.

Emma stood silently behind the maids congratulating Rina.

She wouldn't be able to have another sparing session with Kent until she managed to summon a creature like Rina had.

Despite the fact that she was all smiles and encouraging everyone could sense that she was bitter about this development.

Everyone besides Rina herself.

She went straight to her sister giving her a huge hug and talking about how amazing she was back there completely oblivious to how a sister must have been feeling.

The people in the room continued to shower Rina with praise which caused me to feel like I was suffocating as memories from my old life started to flood back to me.

I was the one who taught Rina how to perform the mini-sprint.

I figured it out months ago with absolutely no assistance, and yet I never got any praise for it.

I was a child prodigy in my old world as well.

Although I was poor, my very early years were filled with praise from my parents, my teachers, and even my classmates who I didn't tend to get along with.

As much as I hated to admit it to myself there was a deep dark part of me that craved the adoration from others.

The feeling of accomplishment and acceptance that one felt when being praised fuelled me to do better and to push myself to no the end.

A large part of my ego became living up to the expectations of others and being better than everyone else.

But there is a tiny secret people don't tell you about praise and that is it doesn't actually matter how amazing you are or how hard you’re working, you only get exalted for surpassing your limits.

It doesn't matter if you get 99% on all of your subjects and top the entire class the question becomes why weren't you able to get 100%?

Achievement slowly becomes a given and excellence becomes the expectation.

If you don't keep one-upping every single achievement you had in the past people go from loving you to being indifferent and eventually actively hating you.

Why aren't you improving? Why aren't you taking your work seriously don't you care?

The pursuit of fulfilling the expectations of others was a fruitless endeavor and I knew it, I’ve known it for years.

That being said there was always that little voice in my head pushing me to fight for it, pushing me to be smarter, faster, and stronger until even my health would fail me.

Failure was inevitable in this race but it was still something that I could delay as much as possible.

I could squeeze a bit more happiness out of my life before it all comes crashing down.

That's why I need to master melee weapons and learn magic as soon as possible I need to excide expectations I need to show how amazing I am once again and show everyone that I was still worthy.

To do that I need to train I needed to figure this problem out and get things done.

With that thought, I picked up my book fresh with everything I learned from the battle I just watched as well as containing possible solutions to problems I realized I had and began to walk back to my room with determination in my eyes.