[MA] 187. Burden of Mentorship (Patreon)

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The weeks went by while Shen overhauled his mentality.

Due to cultural differences and Shen's personal difficulties, Liya had to adapt his training multiple times.

The most significant change came when she recalled a fellow drow saying they had had similar trouble when training a young disciple. The foolish girl had grown up believing she was worthless and then found her identity as a genius swordswoman—except she thought the weapon she wielded was what made her valuable. Thus, she tried to become an extension of that weapon.

The solution had been to constantly let her touch, hold, and even swing a sword while teaching her unarmed combat, before it was time for sword training. Doing such helped her feel the weapon and contrast it against her body and soul to pinpoint their differences.

Liya did the same to Shen, leaving the training spear close and letting him touch it every now and then.

It worked wonders.

In fact, the "faults" in the training weapon likely also helped him contrast it against what his Spear-based core Concept told him a spear should be. That would assist with his Rupture Pilgrimage later.

The method's effectiveness led Liya to assume the boy had gone through similar experiences as the young swordswoman. Maybe he had thought of himself as a weapon for too long. Maybe he had never even considered himself a true person to begin with. He had some past trauma or another.

Liya didn't care; everyone had bad things and a complicated past to deal with.

She never softened her blows out of pity.

= - = - =

One month later, Liya watched Feng Shen finally run properly.

True Path Walkers rarely changed their ways, but he was too young and had walked a True Path for too little time. It shouldn't be too cemented.

Yet, one month was double the time she had expected from someone with his learning ability, not counting his talent. It evidenced how deep his traumas ran and how central his ideal of spears had been to his identity.

On the other hand, he had stepped up the training's difficulty by himself and, when questioned, had said it helped him imbue the training's teachings more deeply into his consciousness.

He had started shadowboxing while running.

That increased how long it took him to go through the first training phase, but she let him. As much as the drow methods were effective, she also had to concede that he knew himself, his Path and hardships, better than her. Only a stupid mentor would ignore a student's considerations when they seemed well-intended. Moreover, it would also help with the next training phase, which focused on unarmed combat.

Liya approved of his enthusiasm, though she couldn't tell him that.

In the end, no matter the means, she accomplished her goal. Shen's Path was overhauled in the face of overwhelming, undeniable, absolute proof of his body's superiority.

He was finally using his system-enhanced biological muscles to the max and moving in a way that didn't expose his weakness as much. Many of his moves' rough edges were gone, replaced with smoothness and balance.

Liya had also worked on making him use most of the flexibility given to him by his agility—within reason. It became needed after the idiot broke his shoulder bones by trying to turn his arm back too much. He really had no idea of where his body's limits lay, almost as if he had never used it before.

But some things were impossible for his body, even a mana-enhanced one. There were many reasons humanoid bodies were the way they were, one of which was strengthening the movements they could do. A join couldn't bend back, but the muscle disposition optimized bending forward.

Feng Shen would understand that better in the next phase—and he was finally ready for it.

But first, she would reward him.

When he finished running around like a human with D+ stats rather than a human-spear hybrid monstrosity, she gestured for him to stop and said, "I suppose I'm pleased enough with your performance. I give you the right to ask me one question. You can ask me anything you want. Take your time thinking about it."

"Did you really kill Marzia?" he asked immediately.

Liya suppressed a frown. His question proved she hadn't pushed him enough; he had had too much free time to think of things other than his training. She would not make the same mistake twice.

But that would come later. Now, she smiled as malevolently as she could.

"Yes," she lied. "Yes, I did."

Allowing him to ask a question had been a reward, so she didn't enjoy lying, but his training came first. If she revealed the truth now, the lesson about betrayal wouldn't stick so well.

Also, it was partly his fault for wasting a question to a peak C-rank with something he could find out on his own when he had the time.

Liya couldn't reward such stupidity.

Feng Shen didn't look surprised, but she saw the hope in his eyes decrease. Not die, though. He was the kind of person who would need to see Marzia's corpse to fully believe she was dead.

Not that it prevented his anger from burning more fiercely than ever. The qi in his body ran faster and almost made his body's stats break through the D+ tier.

Liya's smile widened.

He was ready to learn how to fight like a drow.

= - = - =

Basic drow unarmed combat techniques had been developed mainly for three things.

First, assisting the fighters in better understanding their body's advantages and limits.

That indirectly also made them better understand their weapons' advantages and limitations. Moreover, further assimilating how different their body was from their weapon would assist them when the time came for their Rupture Pilgrimage.

Second, giving fighters a secondary weapon to fight with: their bodies.

The focus here was on secondary. Their bodies weren't whatever primary weapon they wielded. Secondary weapons were used on top of the primary weapons or when the latter wasn't available. An example was when Liya had created an opening for Shen, yet he tried to use his arm as a spear to take advantage of it rather than punch her properly by taking full advantage of his body's strengths.

Third, introduce topics that were also crucial for weapon-wielding combat, regardless of the weapon.

These included balance, momentum, vibration, flow, timing, positioning, dodging, attack denial, and so on.

As with almost everything the drow did, their unarmed fighting style focused on efficiency. It could be pushed to great depths, but only by those who walked a Path related to fist fighting. Liya herself only knew the basics, as did most weapon-wielding drow.

However, being basic didn't mean it wasn't useful in a real fight. Quite the opposite; the style was made to kill as fast as possible with little care for stamina or mana expenditure.

It was called basic only because it didn't go past the point where further improvement would waste more time than it was worth. It didn't, for instance, get into the fine details of energy conservation depending on the circumstances. It also didn't go into depth on all matchup possibilities and how unarmed combat could prevail.

Everyone's time was limited, and it was better to focus on one's primary skills after a certain point.

Not that Shen wasn't even close to that point.

Right now, the technique's lethality only meant Shen wasn't happy. Liya had just ordered him to do his best against her without using qi. He was doing better due to his body-usage improvements, but the spar's objective was so he could witness the fighting style first-hand.

He could only suffer.

A simple punch in the face cracked and almost shattered his cheekbones and most of his teeth. If a D-rank's looks could kill, Liya would be dead after the glare she received.

She smiled. "I can tell what you're thinking. I'm stronger than you, and it's unfair to not let you use qi to strengthen yourself. Stop being a pathetic sore loser on top of everything else. I'm not using my Path, only the basic moves of drow unarmed combat. I'm also limiting my stats to D-tier. Not D+, D."

He squinted his eyes as if he couldn't believe her.

Liya snickered. "You're just too new to the Alliance, thus too astonished by your system-enhanced stats. You think they are better than they actually are. Don't let your immunity to G bullets make you believe you're immune to damage from lower-ranked attacks."

The first two phases of his training focused on understanding the value of said stats in his body, but overly depending on them was a different kind of stupid. Liya would never let that happen.

She continued, "If D+ resistance was as good as you think, you wouldn't have fought gnolls with D+ resistance and D+ armor. Your muscles and bones are more robust and faster than ever, but they are still flesh and bones. Your skin protects you better than ever, but it's still skin. It should be no surprise that people developed ways of circumventing different defenses over time."

Feng Shen looked a little less doubtful after she pointed out the obvious.

Liya kept explaining it to him, "The drow researched all kinds of beings, materials, and methods to develop our unarmed fighting style. It comes with many advantages. One of them is letting me 'exploit a loophole,' if I can even call it that, in the Laws of Reality.

"My first vibrated at a frequency harmful to most carbon-based bones we found in our research. The resulting shockwave mostly bypassed your skin and muscles to focus on your bones. They were almost pulverized despite my D-tier-comparable strength being inferior to your D+ resistance.

"That's possible because of a simple truth: everything is energy. You're probably thinking of the metaphysical ones, qi and mana, but you forget matter is also energy. So is vibration, which is what I used.

"Understanding and correctly using the principle that states that Reality is energy allow someone to apply the suitable form of energy in the right way for maximum efficiency against another form of energy.

"When I order you to fight me weaponless and qi-less, you see my body and use yours to try to hurt me. In other words, you see only one facet of my energetic existence, my body's matter, and use the same facet against me. I only forbid you from using qi, not other kinds of energy.

"You're limiting yourself on your own accord.

"That becomes even more obvious when you acknowledge that you're using kinetic energy to move and get to me. You likely don't consciously think about it or consider using other energy forms, like vibration. If I had forbidden all kinds of energy in this fight, there wouldn't be a fight; you wouldn't even be able to move. In fact, your only option would've been to turn yourself into the Void. You can't even exist without energy in one form or the other."

Liya let that sink for a moment.

Her words were obvious, yet few fight-focused Path Walkers reached such enlightenment on their own, especially when they were as inexperienced as Feng Shen. As much as their Path made them stronger and overall better, it could also limit them if they had trouble differentiating their intrinsic self, the "Walker" part, from the Path they walked. True Path Walkers suffered even more in that regard.

A spear only knew how to be a spear and nothing else.

Liya herself also suffered from such tunnel vision to some extent. For instance, she guessed she had said something wrong about what energy was or wasn't.

Yet, she didn't care. What she knew was good enough for her purposes. She could bridge incorrect facts with her willpower alone when using magic. She had detected no signs of it limiting her power enough for it to be worth spending her time perfecting her knowledge of energy.

That was the way of things for almost everyone. You could talk to any A-rank and find out they were outright wrong in something that you might find as obvious as one plus one being two.

Just as a weapon-wielding fighter didn't pursue fist fighting beyond what was needed due to time constraints, one also didn't double-check and research every single drop of knowledge they had.

Sometimes second-guessing parts of yourself was valuable, but even that usually only came after finding a hurdle preventing you from growing further.

Too little time, too much to do, too many possibilities to pursue.

That's one of the reasons proper mentorship was crucial for an elite to properly develop—and why older races in the Alliance had a much easier time keeping their position.

It wasn't just material resources that mattered. Having access to exceptional resources played a factor, of course. However, Liya could give Shen a pile of the best treasures in the Alliance right now, give him access to the best places, and even after what he had already learned, even with his first-class talent, she would bet her life on him never going beyond C-rank by himself, if he even reached that high. It was more likely that using the resources at the wrong time or incorrectly would cripple him and force him to stay at D-rank until someone killed him.

After all, it wasn't just one's biological life expectancy that limited one's time to invest in improving oneself.

Nobody existed in limbo. Stagnation was bad enough if one was part of an established group in the Multiverse Alliance. For someone in a new, weak race, it was an unforgivable sin.

For a Rising Star, it was a death sentence.

Fortunately for Feng Shen, the Alliance knew that, too. As much as it was terrible most of the time, a few races had pushed for ways to get unaffiliated elites recognized and trained. They still feared the Void and needed powerful fighters.

That had led to an orc's Incarnation recognizing Feng Shen's potential. Then, the orc had sold the boy to Liya, which was the best thing to ever happen to her stupid charge. And now, Liya was turning him into more than a caveman with a pointy stick.

"If you told me to use no mana and fight you," she continued her lesson, "I wouldn't just think of you as a material target. When I see you, I see energy in multiple forms. You are matter—and related physical energies—vibration, qi, Laws, Concepts, soul, mind.

"When I consider attacking you, I think of the different forms of energy I can use to hurt you, and in each form, I consider multiple ways of using it. I consider using energy manifest in a material form, my physical existence, and then determine if my fist, foot, or weapon would be the most effective. I consider energy in the form of vibrations and how much of it I should apply, where, and the area. I consider my mind and wonder whether overwhelming or distracting yours would be more effective.

"You only think of cutting your enemies down. That's nothing more than using matter against matter—a facet of energy against the same facet. Even when you add qi to the mix, it's usually only to potentialize the said facet's destructive potential.

"A pointy edge in a physical object is good for piercing, yet vibration used correctly can be much more effective for crushing, as I did to your bones. Not always, but often enough that you should at least consider it before mindlessly trying to stab your enemy with your hand."

To Feng Shen's credit, he had the sense to look ashamed.

"The drow unarmed combat method can exploit the weaknesses of almost any matter up to B-rank.

"The basics I'll teach you don't contain the exhaustive list, but you'll learn how to counter the general composition of the materials more commonly found in the Alliance. You'll also be told why and how that happens. That way, you can infer new applications to different materials by yourself.

"Lastly, you'll also be introduced to creative ways of using energy in different forms, which would make any drow change how they see Reality. Not that I have such hopes for you, of course."

Feng Shen kept silent as he considered her words for a moment, then showed cautious trust in her logic.

Liya widened her smile and raised her fists. "Now, let me show you the full range of said techniques. There's a unique kind of enlightenment that only comes when one gets kicked in the balls with an attack meant to crush metal."

There was no such enlightenment, of course. Feeling the vibrations rampage through his body would assist him, but not so much, especially not when she targeted such a place.

Unfortunately for Feng Shen, he was too pleased with himself and the results of the training's first phase. Even after she lied about Marzia's death, his rage was already dampening from the implications of what she had just said. He was losing himself in self-improvement—which was likely also part of his Path.

But while a drow didn't let their feelings overwhelm them, they also never let go of their enmities or lost track of their goals. Doing any of those things was a show of weakness, and in the Alliance, that was the same as inviting trouble from an opportunistic race.

Liya smiled cruelly, "I'm told getting kicked in the balls is almost as good to enlighten someone as getting beheaded, but losing one's head tends to be final. I'm sure your Maiden friend could tell you all about—" She widened her eyes in mock surprise and covered her mouth with her hand. "Oopsie."

She didn't slap him with her domain this time, but the damage she caused to his psyche was much worse.

At least it should have been.

Though Shen's ire increased, it wasn't as much as she had expected. Liya frowned. He couldn't be already learning to control his emotions, could he? That should've taken longer from what she had seen of him.

No matter. Liya still had many ways of inflicting humiliating physical pain, some of which were one step away from actual torture. She was sure at least a few would work to make him angrier at her.

They would also increase his resistance to pain and taunting, but he was unlikely to appreciate it during the process.

Liya wouldn't enjoy it either, but such was the burden of mentorship.

[A/N: I wanted to move further in this chapter, but one thing led to another. I like it regardless. It opens a whole new world for Shen, and I didn't want to half-ass the explanation.]

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