The training grounds had received large amounts of investments since I was younger, in part due to the increase in knights we had, also in part due to the amount of damage I had caused to them with my nonsensical escapades. They really wouldn't be the most pleased people on the face of the earth if I just... manifested there. Again.
But... they didn't have to know now did they? If I could mask my movements, there's no reason that any of them would be experienced enough to detect me.
But the mana was a bigger issue. My mana pool in this life had far more potential for growth than my original, and even at the age of eight, I still would be leaking a very detectable quantity of mana.
Couldn't I just ask Elena or Elias to build my own mini training ground? Where I could just practice with dummies or any of the knights with free time?
Hmm. That sounds like a really good idea.
But where's the fun in that?
Doing this the easy way?
That's how losers think.
I was going to stroll into the training grounds, and nobody would dare to sense me.
I needed to check who was on rotation at this time, just in case anybody practicing currently were a little too trigger happy with the sword. On the slim chance they detected me I didn't want to get divided in half by a trainee who didn't understand what self control was.
I could feel my heart rate elevating as I thought about how I would go about doing this.
I could enter from the back of the grounds, they were taught to face in one direction when training, more than likely the forward.
Eh, who needs a plan?
Not me.
I started the process of masking my mana, covering my body in a thin sheet of mana. Counterintuitive as it sounded, if I could coax the mana current into rotating inwards, it would serve as a shield for the mana leaving my body, and wouldn't be easily detected as it wasn't outputting any mana.
One step, then the next. The soil pressed into my boots, gritty and uneven, as if it knew I was breaking rules I shouldn't even be approaching.
I forced my breath to a shallow rhythm, every inhale a calculation, every exhale a push.
My body leaned forward, weaving slightly to avoid the swinging arcs of knights I couldn't let notice me.
The mana shielding my body buzzed faintly against my skin, like an invisible wind tugging at my limbs. If I pushed too hard, it would falter, leaking my presence into the air. Each step was a careful balance—speed and stealth warring within me.
My arms pumped, legs stretched, heart thudding, and still I had to think like a sprinter, not a boy who was in too big for his britches.
The silhouettes of the knights ahead swung clumsily, yet each blade caught my peripheral just enough to force micro-adjustments.
A slip here, a misstep there, and everything could blow. My pulse shot higher, a stark warning that the longer I stayed in this form, the thinner the line between perfection and disaster became.
I didn't want to run the risk running out of my mana reserves halfway through and being left exposed to the world like this.
The fast movement of the ground beneath my feet was dizzying, and so I opted to look at the knights ahead.
In all fairness, they seemed to be trainees, so it wasn't the worst they could be doing. God knows how bad I was when I first started.
But, if anything, when I looked more closely, the swordsmanship of one of them, meekly swinging in the bottom left of the grounds, reminded be vaguely of the fighting style of Eryndal, a small kingdom to the west, it used to boast an impressive collection of martial artists and swordsmen alike. It had also happened to be where I had met Kaelis during my travels.
The swordsmanship they displayed was slightly different, likely minor changes made over time as fighting had evolved, but I was just happy that the home of my old friend still stood two thousand years later.
My target came closer; a small section of the training ground separated from the rest, where nobody would see me but I would be free to practice as I pleased.
A crack reverberated every time my feet touched the floor, compressing air into the ground faster than it could move away. I was leaving literal footprints of my movement, glowing in white as my feet slammed into the dirt.
In my thoughts, I had been subconsciously dodging the knights. Although I did end up bumping into one of them, by the time his brain had processed what had happened I was already dozens of meters away.
I was less of a physical human traversing through the area, and more of a blur, shimmering like smoke as I flew past their eyes.
The area I was aiming for flew into sight, the moment I judged I was close enough, about 50 or so meters away, I dropped my center and drove my heels into the loam, creating a destructive trench behind me, flinging soil in every direction.
A third of a second later, I had successfully stop moving, The effective gravity didn't pull down—it hammered into my chest from the front, a relentless, invisible wall trying to crush my lungs against my spine. I turned around, the destructive trail I had left apparent, literally steaming behind me.
The trench wasn't just dirt anymore; it was a vein of molten slag, glowing a lethal, volcanic red where my heels had fused the silica into glass. Surprisingly, nobody had seemed to notice me, and were instead more busy trying to recalibrate every nerve in their body that had been flung by the transonic eight year old that had just desecrated the entire courtyard.
The bottom of my feet burned like molten metal, the soles of my shoes having disappeared into what was closer to a smear across what was once a dirt path (emphasis on the was).
The mana bubble shook under the load. My body screamed as it translated over twenty-one thousand Newtons of force into the loam.. It had stopped being merely a slide, and had started being more resemblant of a hydraulic press driven by the weight of a falling building, focused entirely through the narrow points of my heels.
I had stopped (mostly), but my wake didn't. The wall of air I'd been dragging slammed into the courtyard a heartbeat later, a physical hammer-blow that sent the training dummies—and more than just a few of the knights—sprawling into the dirt.
That was... way faster than I intended.
What was that? Mach eight-tenths? Mach three-quarters? Regardless, I was going to have hell to answer to in the form of Elena.
Should I run? Probably not they'd figure me out.
I entirely forgot how destructive speed was.
I should've remembered to cover the area around me with mana, not just myself. That might've prevented the... minor property damage.
Thank God Elena wasn't home right now. Maybe if I could convince Elias, he'd stand in for me—though even thinking about asking him made my stomach twist.
I couldn't imagine the lecture he'd give about property damage, or y'know—staying in the house, or basically every other rule I'd broken in the last thirty seconds.
For the time being, though, I needed to do something. Pronto.
I dropped my hands to the floor, letting the tips of my fingers press into the soft loam.
The mana shivered beneath my skin, as if impatient, eager to obey—or maybe it was just as chaotic as I felt.
I forced it downward, into the earth, watching it snake through the dirt in glowing cyan veins.
Each pulse of energy carried a subtle vibration, a thrum against my bones that threatened to betray my control if I pushed too hard.
I maneuvered it carefully, trying to coax the ground back into some semblance of order.
The craters and scars I'd left didn't want to settle—they resented being filled, pushed aside, as if the earth itself had a memory of my presence.
I twisted the mana, shaped it like a semi-solid, and pressed, lifted, and prodded the fractured soil, coaxing it upward, inch by inch.
Every bubble of displaced air, every grain of dirt, threatened to betray my haste.
By the time I finally managed to bring the surface close to normal, I was breathing hard. The ground wasn't perfect—it probably never would be—but it was enough that someone passing by wouldn't immediately notice the chaos an eight-year-old had left behind. And, for now, that had to be enough.
I brought myself back up from my knees.
I could feel the mana coursing around my body from my core, moving almost in parallel to my blood, illuminating my veins like a torch. My pulse raced, moving dozens, if not over a hundred beats per minute faster than usual.
The strain on my muscles was immense. Moving near the speed of sound really wasn't something my body was made to handle.
The world hadn't slowed down; it had instead became impossibly sharp. Every blade of grass, every link in a knight's mail, every grain of dust—they had all hit my retinas at full speed, a million snapshots of a world moving too fast for anyone else to see.
And now I was bearing the full brunt of that mental overload. My brain felt like it was melting in my skull, spilling out of my eyes and—I wasn't imagining that.
One drop of hot crimson hit the floor, then another.
I was bleeding. From my eyes and ears.
"AGHH!" I screamed out, gripping my skull. The world went into black and white, shaking viciously. Then a film of red draped itself over my eyes.
II gripped my temples, my fingers white-knuckled, digging into the bone, and shook my head with a violent, animalistic frenzy.
I lurched forward—a trembling, uncoordinated mess of a boy—my feet, instead of walking, kicked into the ground until it found traction. One agonised, high-speed lurch at a time.
I wasn't 'viewing' the training ground; I was being bombarded by it. My brain was actually cooking itself in my head, I was experiencing proprioceptive failure, retinal hemorrhaging, and intracranial hypertension all at once.
I was no longer experiencing the world, it felt like I was melting into it.
With the little power in i could muster, I coated my brain in a somewhat mana bubble. I was too unstable to do it properly, but I could manage to create something. It was my way of preventing my brain from actually leaking out of my head. At least, any more than it already had.
The bubble vibrated, letting head out of my brain, and absorbing and releasing it through my skull into the surroundings.
The sweat from heating up the area surrounding my head caused beads of sweat to form instantly, but it was better than insulating my brain into a pink gloop otherwise.
"Shhhlluhhhg" I tried to speak, but the processing in my brain had failed. I was lucky I hadn't melted the medulla oblongata during this, but instead of looking on the bright side, it would be infinitely better to manage the bad side. Like. Right now.
"Hu-hyuuuhhgh" I tried to scream, shout, do anything for help, but there was simply nothing in my brain to transfer this request to my vocal cords, and instead I relayed a slurred groan, probably managing to show my need for help just as effectively.
The jagged shards of absolute void-black began to grow, swallowing the red and white that obscured my vision.
It wasn't like falling asleep, no, it was like a candle being simply snuffed out in a tempest.
The sounds of the knights shouting—their voices high and distorted by my tinnitus—faded into a dull, subterranean hum.
My knees didn't just buckle; they ceased to exist to me.
I hit the loam I had just painstakingly fixed, the heat of the ground a distant, dying sensation against my cheek.
The last thing I saw was a pair of polished boots entering my fading peripheral, and a shining grey object. A sword? Maybe. But it didn't matter now.
Then, the hardware simply gave up.