(TPOR0 Chapter 133: You Made A Sound (Patreon)

Ash stood in the vast training arena. She wondered how she had ended up here. In truth, it wasn’t a long span between where she was and how she had ended up here. It was merely worrying. Oliver had lost, unarguably. Chris had… drawn? She wasn’t entirely certain how to categorize the outcome of Chris’ match. On the one hand, she hadn’t lost, but on the other, she hadn’t won against someone who had just come out of a fight against Oliver.

She wasn’t sure if it was a testament to the Olympian’s strength, Oliver’s weakness, or Chris’ ability. Whatever it was, it certainly did a lot to demotivate Ash’s spirits.

Since the rise of the VHF, everyone had borne one or two ill wills towards the Olympians. Standing before her opponent, she was beginning to realize that most of those who bore ill will towards them had inherited it. For instance, she’d never met an Olympian in her life, never associated with one before a few months ago, but she had never liked them. She’d heard stories of burning towns and ironfist ruling. She’d heard of rebels and rebellions. And rarely were rebels ever the bad side, they were always the oppressed fighting for betterment, for justice.

Like most people, she had seen the VHF as the evil ones. That was yet to change. A few good eggs did not make an entire organization good. But that was a by-product of a thought. Here and now, there was another flaw people had about Olympians. In their suits of armor, buttressed by its size and sheer combat capabilities, they walked through the world oppressing both mages and non-mages. It helped others look down on them. If they weren’t protected behind their suits of armor, they would be nothing but mages capable of being defeated in any fight. The consensus was that if they stepped out of their armor, they were just like every other mage, they could be defeated easily. Ash subscribed to that consensus.

That consensus was wrong.

The weight of recent happenings pressed down on Ash. It battered her confidence, suffocated her will. Whatever confidence came from surviving the world, the chaos of the second awakening, was dimmed, drowning. She had thought herself sufficient in her place as a category three Beta mage. She was not the kind to fall under the delusion of power she did not have. She knew she wasn’t powerful, but she was confident in her achievement. She only wished she still had that confidence. In light of Zed’s quick advancements, and the single Olympian’s display against Oliver and Chris, what had once been a simple flame of confidence was now nothing but embers of a dying hearth, a shadow of what it once was.

“Are you done with your pep thoughts?”

Ash’s mind pulled itself to the present, to her opponent. Ronda stood in simple pants and a tank top; hands akimbo. The top was short, exposing her stomach. It was a soft gray color that seemed to lean towards white. It looked new and clean, unbothered by the strain of the current world’s state. It reminded Ash that the VHF were different from the rest of the world.

She must be really confident in her abilities, Ash thought. People preferred to fight with more clothes on, it reduced the chances of accurate attacks. It was harder to hit the solar plexus if you didn’t know where specifically it was. Seeing it made it far easier.

Ash shook the thoughts from her head and took a combat stance, fists raised and legs apart. It was unnecessary for a mage, but it put her in a combat mood. Her core came alive, active and ready. All she needed was the mark to beginning and she would flood Ronda with whatever magic she could raise.

She would not lose.

“Begin!”

Daniel’s word triggered Ash to action. She cast a specialization spellform first, wordless and without delay, hands held out before her. A ball of water gathered between her hands and shot forward. Ronda stood unbothered. Hands still rested on her waist she stepped aside. The ball of water blasted past her. Its trajectory didn’t slow. The orb was as large as Ash’s head, and it struck the wall with the full weight of all the force she had put behind it.

The wall was left unblemished.

Ash looked back at the wall before looking back at Ash. “Were you trying to take my head off?” she asked with an amused smil. “That packed a punch.”

This was what Ash had feared. That reaction speed.

She conjured a new spellform. Water coalesced into spikes around her. Five spears hovered over her. Each spear of water was as long as her arm and as wide as a finger. She had wanted to end the fight in one go, sadly that would not be happening. The Olympians were all attribute mages, their bodies had sacrificed the gift of spellforms to grant some kind of physical advancement. The Olympian that had faced Chris had possessed an attribute that made his body powerful, evident in how he had taken Chris’ attacks head on.

Ash wondered what Ronda’s attribute was. Or how many she had. And how many runes she was capable of casting.

………………

Zed couldn’t help the small smile that tugged at his lip when Ronda avoided Ash’s attack. He’d sparred with Ash enough times to know that attack had been desperate. It was not the way Ash sparred. Even if he was of the opinion that she had often taken it easy on him, there were always patterns when people fought. Ash wasn’t cheeky in her fights, but she was cautious. Wild attacks were rare from her, and so were quick attacks. She always took her time, quick actions were reserved for counter attacks and defensive reactions.

Zed watched as Ash fired off spears of water at Ronda. Each spear was treated with the same level of attention from Ronda. The Olympian moved with simple steps. It was like watching a choreography. She slipped past each spear so that they either fired off into the wall behind her or dissolved into non-existence. With each spear she dodged, Ash’s expression grew dour.

Zed made a contemplative sound, noting it.

“What’s that?” Kid asked.

“What’s what?” he returned.

“You made a sound.”

“So did you,” Zed pointed out, eyes fixed on the fight still going on. Ronda was yet to execute a single attack. She remained on the defensive. Ash was now switching to actual spellforms that didn’t depend on water, slowly branching out into other spellforms.

She cast a flare of light for distraction, a blast of fire for the heat, shards of jagged summoned rocks as large as a person’s head for effective damage. Ronda was quick to evade them all.

The spar was playing out and it was becoming clear that Ash was running low on mana. She was growing tired, the space between her spells slower than normal. Loss tap-danced at the edge of the spar, a grin kept specially for Ash.

“That’s actually impressive,” Zed muttered.

Kid snorted in response. “You haven’t even seen anything. Give her a gun and this fight would’ve been over long ago.”

Zed fought the subconscious urge to turn to Kid at his words. The first time he’d seen Ash, she had had a gun. However, he realized he had never actually seen her use it which was odd. In her defense, most of the time after that had been spent with the weapon undergoing repairs.

“So she’s good with a gun?” he asked Kid as he kept watching, trying to figure out how Ronda could evade everything Ash was throwing at her so easily.

“Yes,” Kid answered easily.

“They must teach you quite the defensive skills for her to be able to do that,” he said just as Ronda changed her defensive position. Now, when she evaded and dodged, she inched closer to Ash. “Does she have any runes she’s good at?”

Kid’s lips pursed in thought before he answered.

“Nothing like Lenny’s,” he said. “But her attributes are what’s letting her do all that.”

Ronda got within reaching distance of Ash. She threw a jab just as Ash was conjuring a spellform that made water rise from the ground beneath them. The spell fell apart as Ash was forced to evade the blow, duck to the side to avoid a nose bleed. Rather than conjure another spellform, Ash moved to create space between them. Ronda was having none of it.

She followed like an animal with prey in its sight.

“Rookie move,” Kid muttered, his voice stained with a touch of disappointment. “If you’re going to abandon your spells, then you better be good at close quarters.”

A part of Zed agreed. When a ranged fighter went up against a melee fighter, the battle could be considered lost to the ranged fighter the moment the fight was turned into one for close quarters. There were exceptions to the rule, but Zed doubted Ash was one of those exceptions.

A part of his brain blanked at his reasoning. How did he know this? Where did the confidence come from? The answer came a moment after. The Berserker. It seemed getting some of his memories was yet to purge The Berserker’s subconscious influence on him. The thought brought him to another question. How was he going to get the other memories he had locked away in his [Memory pocket]s, was he going to have to wait until his notifications offered him a quest with his memories as a reward? If that was the case, it felt as if the notifications were, in some way, holding his own memories hostage.

Not for the first time, Zed found the notifications suspicious. Doctor Shequifa had claimed it was his brain’s way of coping with things when he was in the dreamscapes but they had followed him into the real world. Their ability to predict outcomes in the dreamscape was one thing but doing it in real life left him with questions. For the first time he asked a question with all the seriousness he had. How does it do that?

Ronda threw a punch that caught Ash in the gut. It rocked her but, to Zed’s surprise, Ash merely staggered back before calling up a wall of earth between them. It was as tall as eight feet and as wide as two people. Zed had seen her use that spell once, in a forgotten time. He knew she couldn’t hold it for long. Ash only used it as distractions, often to by even a second of time. She was trying to restrategize but Ronda was having none of it.

The Olympian side stepped the wall as it came up, moving with a sharp dexterity. She was on Ash before the wall was all the way up.

How does she move like that? Zed wondered.

“She’s quick, isn’t she,” Kid said beside him.

Zed agreed, but not entirely. Yes, Ronda was quick, but speed wasn’t necessarily what made her do what she was doing. He could see it but wasn’t sure of what he was seeing. It was less about her being fast and more about her decisions being quick and precise. She moved only when she was supposed to, without hesitation or delay.

As if reading Zed’s mind, Kid said, “It’s her attributes.”

This time Zed turned away from the fight to look at Kid. The last thing he saw was Ash taking a kick to the leg. It was strong enough to knock the single leg off the ground, throw Ash’s footing off kilter.

“Her attribute?” he asked Kid.

Kid nodded. “As you already know, all Olympians only have attributes. No spellforms for us.”

Could Zed really say he knew that? No. He was very certain he didn’t know that. Regardless, he nodded, inspiring Kid to go on.

“Well, you require two attributes to qualify for an Olympian armor,” Kid went on. “At least two, you could have more. Lenny has Iron skin. Makes him hard to penetrate or batter down. Ronda over there, however, has two attributes that work beautifully well with each other. It’s almost envious.”

“What’s Lenny’s second attribute?” Zed interrupted.

“Acid blood.”

That sounded terrifying, and Zed told Kid just as much.

“So if you manage to cause him damage, you’ll have to deal with making sure you don’t touch his blood?” he asked.

“Yup,” Kid agreed. “Most people’s attributes tend to work together like that. Take Ronda for example.” He tipped his head towards the fight, where Ronda was now on the offensive, bullying Ash with physical attacks that seemed too well placed. Ash was taking blows she wasn’t supposed to be taking. “Ronda has two attributes, one is quite self-explanatory. We call it clairvoyance.”

Zed cocked a brow. “She can see the future?”

“Well,” Kid dragged the word. “First I think it’s really cool that you can do that, and second, she can’t really see the future, it’s more like reading the flow of mana. Like, she doesn’t shoot a person that is running but shoots where they’ll take their next step.”

Zed mulled over the attribute. His gaze turned slightly, watched Ronda oppress Ash. That seemed to explain how she had been avoiding everything Ash had been throwing at her. But it didn’t answer everything. Perhaps the second attribute would.

“And the second?”

“Puppet master,” Kid said. “A bit overexaggerated, in my opinion. All it does is give her an almost perfect sync with her mind and body. You see that split second delay between deciding to move and moving you get.”

“Nope.”

Kid paused, hesitated. Clearly Zed’s response had not been what he was expecting. After a moment, he shrugged. “Well, it’s a thing almost everyone has. Ronny over there doesn’t.”

“So,” Zed mused, his full attention back on the fight. “She has eyes that technically predict actions and a body that reacts instantly.”

That explained what was happening. She saw the things Ash was about to do before she did them and had a body that reacted fast enough to keep up with what she was seeing. Ash never stood a chance.