Ulric stood warily. "May" he intoned inside his head. She said "may" not "will". That no doubt deliberate choice of words was all that stood between his existence as a man and his existence as a puddle strewn about with bony chunks of odds and ends. Lady Vedyr Iriel was still smiling though and Ulric was suitably terrified, though he was somewhat certain that he was hiding it well.
A few more tense moments passed though and the woman relaxed her threatening aura.
"I have not abandoned that option, Glade Chief. It would cost me my husband not speaking to me for a few decades, but I could do it. As I bend my thoughts to it, perhaps that might even be an argument in favor, the man has been purely insufferable lately. It may well require bearing him another son to find peace." Vedyr groused, losing her malicious smile at memory of her husband's relentless teasing.
"Even if taunting deliberately to put her off balance, those things you said about my daughter, you meant them?" She said sharply.
Ulric decided immediately against lying. He'd said it and Brighteyes had recited it, word for word, to the entire hall. There was no chance even an attempt at misdirection would save his bacon. Besides which, Ulric hated deceit like a former electric car company owner turned failed astronaut hated paying taxes. Still though, Ulric couldn't meet a mother's eyes with the admission. This was already up there with the most uncomfortable conversations he'd had in his life.
"Well, I wouldn't have put it so crudely if I had had any intention of going anywhere but to a deathmatch about it, but, yeah, I guess I did." He capitulated.
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and, for some reason, seemed to relax a little. Even though she'd heard him admit that he found her daughter to be at maximum boinkage. Elves were an odd sort of people like that.
"Just as well you would not attempt to try hiding it. Many of my Geyrt's suiters lost face, very literally, in some cases, for attempting to hide their intent in courting her. She is a brilliant flower amongst her people, just as her parents are." Said the elf woman with no shame whatsoever.
"I will not have a questionable entity known to misdirect or dissemble have charge of her. Better to anger my husband and keep my daughter's honor intact; he would get over it soon enough if I had reason to suspect your intent. Know that if any such thing happens, I would stand no chance of finding you first if he learned of any acts that impugned her dignity. Bald'rt Iriel holds my daughter first amongst the stars in his eyes." Vedyr warned, the threat gaining magnitude for its nebulous lack of specificity.
This was not news to Ulric, the Elven lord had admitted as much publicly so it was, apparently, common knowledge. It was also a good enough reason to consider his Shadow as eyes only. An unwelcome touch would probably mean she had justification to inform her father that Ulric's ass was grass. If the woman herself didn't pull his heart out of his urethra, let us not forget that part Old Man, he told himself.
Ulric was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to pull off that trick from before, Geyrt would take things slow and steady and shave him apart by the centimeter if it came to it. He knew Brighteyes thought he could take Geyrt evenly but Ulric himself had no such certainty. If he got her good with a spell, maybe. He'd probably lost a great deal of that advantage recently, having shown her most of the spells he was capable of using effectively against her.
"It is not a matter that will arise, I assure you Lady Vedyr. No matter how strangely it has come about, or how much I wish that some other arrangement had been made, the current situation finds me responsible for the care of your daughter and her responsible for my well-being, oddly enough. I will do everything I can to see that she remains hale and whole. Besides, Brighteyes would be hurt if anything happened to her and I like that kid." Ulric said with surety.
Vedyr accepted Ulric's spoken word, her face returning to its passive coolness. At last, she turned the subject away from considerations of Ulric's pre-emptive honor killing and towards his betterment.
"I see now that my husband did not exaggerate your status. You are an anomolous creature. Stats are far outside the norm for your people and a core far more well developed than its unawakened condition should lead me to believe. Tell me, what do you know of a core and of mana?" Lady Vedyr asked, ready at last to instruct.
Holding back a sigh of pure relief Ulric told her what he had hypothesized and what he had been able to observe through his senses.
"I may only speak from the perspective of what I know from my prior life and what I have learned by my own experimentation.” Ulric prefaced, suddenly nervous.
Memories of a dissertation suddenly sprang to mind. However, instead of a groups of stodgy old lifers in the engineering department, there stood a simultaneously intoxicatingly bewitching and flat out terrifying fantasy woman. And she might choose to show him exactly why her mighty husband walked softly around her. What pressure? I don’t feel a thing, nope, cool as a frozen cucumber is Ulric Einar, the disgruntled man noted sarcastically to himself. He took a calming breath and carried on with all the fortitude of a cliff jumper daring the rocks below.
“The core is a sort of living crystal, a semi biological condenser of magic. It tunes to the raw mana of the world and draws it in, somehow, converting it to the body's own mana which may then be used. The body has channels, like blood vessels, that seem to connect through-out the body, allowing mana to move through them, again, sort of like blood. When I first arrived on the plateau, I got some kind of fever from my body not being acclimated to mana circulating through it. After the first time I emptied my core and used magic the sickness went away and my core status changed to "tempered" from "untempered". About mana, I know from the Watcher the main elemental compositions of the world, the gist of the primordial and basic elements. I can feel the different compositions of elements in things around me using my own mana but that's about it. Most of what I can do is based on things that I learned from my old world. It generally works but there are unintended outcomes, frequently."
Vedyr pursed her lips at some of his description, thinking out his statements and turning them to her own interpretations. Eventually she set about explaining the core as the Elves understood it.
"Your thoughts are not, wrong, necessarily. They are, however, highly incomplete, as is understandable for one who has not been given instruction. The core is, as you say, the part of one's body that reaches out to the world, touches the Great Field directly, gathers the ambient mana, refines it, and then stores that mana for use. Many do not learn to utilize that mana in the way that you have done, as a mage does, externally. Most circulate the mana within themselves, building the potency of their bodies, allowing them to be faster and stronger than otherwise, to execute skills of their classes. You know of classes, yes?" She finished, waiting for Ulric's confirmation.
When he gave it, she continued her lesson her tone going to that of a wizened school marm making sure particularly troublesome lads and lasses knew that the paddle was close to hand if they stepped out of line.
"Good. You have a novice class already, no doubt gained from your experiences touching mana on your own and hunting the beasts of the wood and those scum who harmed my son. The classes represent a sort of evolution of the self, a growth into more of what you are or, sometimes, a break from what you were into a new interpretation of yourself. There are traits and skills that are universal to classes, the common features that define this role you have fallen into. Others though are unique, the specific techniques and abilities honed by your particular insights and experiences. Know that the classes are nothing if not variable in nature. There are hundreds of known classes, thousands of permutations. Some are exceedingly common, especially those base classes such as Warrior, Hunter, Mage, and so forth. Some are known to have been held by only a rare few. My husband is one such. There have only been a handful of Moonlit Berserkers, the conditions to walk this path being stringent and specific. And also, hopelessly cruel. It is not a thing to wish on a loved one." Vedyr lectured.
She was surprisingly clear and concise in her explanation, neither being overbroad nor running down rabbit holes that would confuse him with their detail. She continued on to explain the growth of a core, tiers of development, and to give Ulric a warning about his own fate.
"You are at a dangerous place in your development, Ulric Glade Chief. You have learned to harness your core's power and wield it externally but have not reinforced yourself to any significant degree. Many mages do this, but only under the strictest of guidance. To be a feral mage, untrained, unguided, is to walk a razor's edge. It is easy to lose control, to guide mana into a binding, a knot of misconceived power and intent that causes a backlash. Such a backlash can destroy your core easily or turn the flesh to ash. Worse for you, you are drawing more mana in your unawakened core than is safe."
The backlash thing Ulric had felt before, as a result to effectively overcharge spells. Holding the mana that way was difficult and required a lot of focus as well as "stamina" from his core, he got tired and the mana got slippery. Failure sent a shockwave back into the core and had been one of the more distinctly uncomfortable experiences he'd had. Good to know that you could do the same thing when casting spells, it was sounding a lot like doing something about which you had insufficient knowledge was the main cause. So don't get fancy with experimenting unless you’re fresh, got it.
"Safe or not, it appears you are not yet at the point where an awakening of your core to true tier three status is imminent. This you will know for sure, un-aspected mana is wildly reactive to the aspected mana around it. It will naturally seek to harmonize, and your core will want to harmonize with it. In its current state though, it cannot. This builds a tension between your internal mana and the world around you, as the density of the mana within you grows, so will the tension. If you continue to grow in strength your core will reach a threshold where it cannot contain the pure mana and must re-crystalize to a harmonic form, aspecting itself in the process to prevent catastrophic resonances. This is the process for awakening. You can control this process, to an extent, by intentionally tuning all of the mana in your body to a specific form, be it primordial, never do this, elemental, or something esoteric. Surrounding yourself in a place where this particular mana is dense assists greatly. Well. Enough of that, you can discuss elemental theory later with Sister Shor."
Now, Glade Chief, I would like to see these spells that you have in your status. Show me each one, in whatever order that you choose. You don't need to use much strength I only want to see how you are utilizing your mana." His Ruby eyed instructor requested, pointing to the center of the arena.
Ulric focused on his core and pulled gently, not intending to go full power with anything, not yet. Concentrating Ulric pulled mana and harmonized it to Terra, solid and stationary, pulling it into a waste high barrier, that formed a circular ring with [Stone Wall]. The wash of ambient mana made it easier and harder. Easier since he felt like he wasn't needing to draw as much from himself, harder since it had a sort of wild feeling, a coltish excitation that accelerated the flow. He was glad he'd started with something a little on the slow and steady side of things, instead of one of his Ceraun experiments.
Reaching again he tuned his mana towards Caelum, wind, and fired a [Wind Blade] at the stone wall that bit out a thin slice of rock. At that short range the spell didn't have time to accelerate itself to true potency but this was just a demonstration of how he used the mana, not the total effectiveness of the spell. Similarly [Flame Crash] launched with low amounts of mana, was not impressive, merely blackening the stone as it washed over the wall in a small radius. The mana in the room really did take some getting used to, his spells, normally practiced into rote instinct, were squirrely.
Holding both hands out Ulric channeled his core to shift from Incendere, fire, to Aquae, water, releasing a tightly focused [Water Jet] that scoured a gouge out of the burned stone. Having none of either of the two elemental manas freely available to him, unlike the stone and air, Ulric had pulled much more mana to achieve these last two spells. The ambient mana made that much easier he could almost feel his core breathing it in, the hot and cold pulses chewing it into his own un-aspected mana supply before bending it towards his mental constructs.
Now they were coming to the hard part. Ulric started easy, Infrig coating his arm to form [Ice Blade] which he threw at the stone as he had the Beastkin marauder, what felt like years ago. The Cold blade bit into the stone and raised frost around its wound, cracking the rock as it erased the residual heat of the [Flame Crash] and expanded the water remaining inside the [Water Jet] hole freezing it.
Ulric dropped his hands and inhaled deeply a few times, giving himself a moment to gather himself. He hadn't cast like this in a little while and chaining spells was taxing. It inflicted a mental exhaustion on him and that was aside from the actual feeling of losing mana, which was a little like your brain being out of breath.
He pushed on though and approached the stone keeping the feel of Infrig. This was going to be a hard one. Ulric put his hand on the top of the stone and concentrated, creating a marble sized sphere of [Absolute Zero] where his hand touched, for only a moment. Stone froze completely around it, as the small region of total cold was spread into the surrounding material, frozen mist poured away from the site and Ulric easily broke away the section of stone, though he dropped it immediately when he felt the burning cold of it on his skin. The stone disintegrated into dust as it fell, hitting the ground as a cloud of particles that poofed to join the fog around the cold mass.
Vedyr had watched with an even expression thus far but when she saw [Absolute Zero] her eyes went wide and she nearly took a step forward before catching herself and settling back into her examination. If she liked that, she was about to get a real show.
Placing his hands together, Ulric carefully drew his mana to tune Ceraun. It felt almost hungry in this environment, like the ambient mana made the very air more conductive. He trusted his instincts on this and spread his hands to allow [Voltaic Grip] to climb arcing between them. Concentrating hard he pulled the mana inwards and inflected [Voltaic Grip] into its newest form, the dozens of searing white arcs collapsing into a single thicker ribbon of flickering power that Ulric pushed to leap into the stone where it skipped, almost joyfully, to its own crackling song across the surface, leaving a scorched, nearly molten mark at its touch, the manifestation of his [Voltaic Riot].
On the home stretch now and feeling fairly good, almost like he had when he'd gone for his sprint earlier, Ulric bent down to pick up a small piece of broken rock. He was going to need a target for this next one. Vedyr was safely behind him so he wasn't as afraid of shrapnel this time, the small handful of stone didn't have enough mass to it to probably do much damage. Not in as many pieces as it was about to be.
Again, Ulric imagined the whirling spiral, black following white, positive leading negative on a merry chase through the held stone, building the link between his budding lightning and its soon to be ground. The atmosphere changed as the charge built, even as hard as Ulric was fighting it to stay contained small arcs jumped from his hand into the air, the raw potential giving the air a nearly metallic flavor. Ceraun raced from his core through its tightening loop imposing his will on the physical forces of the world, bringing the electromagnetic to heel. It took less time now, here in this place, than it ever had and Ulric was glad to relieve the pressure as he flung the stone hard and released his grip.
[Lightning Javelin] ripped a crackling line through the air to destroy the thrown rock. Tiny fragments pelted Ulric's blocking hand but were too small to do damage. Thunder roared through the arena echoing in the space aggressively. The air itself seemed to soak up some of the released energy deadening it or Ulric was pretty sure he would have had an blown ear drum.
That last spell took all he had left, he was at mana exhaustion. Even in this place where the air hummed with magic he couldn't run through his entire spell list without being completely drained, not as taxing as the advanced Infrig and Ceraun spells were on his mana supply. Outside of this wyrd amphitheater he doubted he could have managed these last two spells. Headache throbbing and the beating core fatigue dragging his energy down, Ulric turned to his instructor to give her a thumbs up.
Vedyr Iriel looked like she was chewing the air, shock written across her face. Lady Bathe dropped from the air to land next to her sister-wife, looking for the source of the blast.
From the air? Ulric questioned. Did she just jump from all the way over there? His mind was still trying to wrap itself around that when Shor approached in a stately saunter with Geyrt in tow.
Ulric's shadow was mumbling behind her keeper in Elvish. Ulric couldn't quite catch it from that distance but he heard "Told you", "senseless", and "monster" in there somewhere. That was quite the complement if anybody asked him, especially in light of Brighteyes' mother superman jumping around the place. As they closed in on him, Ulric noticed that he was distinctly outnumbered on the sexes front. If all four of them descended on him with their henpecking they'd make short work of him, and he committed to a tried and true strategy of nods and "Yes ma'm"s for the forseeable future.
Ulric stood warily. "May" he intoned inside his head. She said "may" not "will". That no doubt deliberate choice of words was all that stood between his existence as a man and his existence as a puddle strewn about with bony chunks of odds and ends. Lady Vedyr Iriel was still smiling though and Ulric was suitably terrified, though he was somewhat certain that he was hiding it well.
A few more tense moments passed though and the woman relaxed her threatening aura.
"I have not abandoned that option, Glade Chief. It would cost me my husband not speaking to me for a few decades, but I could do it. As I bend my thoughts to it, perhaps that might even be an argument in favor, the man has been purely insufferable lately. It may well require bearing him another son to find peace." Vedyr groused, losing her malicious smile at memory of her husband's relentless teasing.
"Even if taunting deliberately to put her off balance, those things you said about my daughter, you meant them?" She said sharply.
Ulric decided immediately against lying. He'd said it and Brighteyes had recited it, word for word, to the entire hall. There was no chance even an attempt at misdirection would save his bacon. Besides which, Ulric hated deceit like a former electric car company owner turned failed astronaut hated paying taxes. Still though, Ulric couldn't meet a mother's eyes with the admission. This was already up there with the most uncomfortable conversations he'd had in his life.
"Well, I wouldn't have put it so crudely if I had had any intention of going anywhere but to a deathmatch about it, but, yeah, I guess I did." He capitulated.
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and, for some reason, seemed to relax a little. Even though she'd heard him admit that he found her daughter to be at maximum boinkage. Elves were an odd sort of people like that.
"Just as well you would not attempt to try hiding it. Many of my Geyrt's suiters lost face, very literally, in some cases, for attempting to hide their intent in courting her. She is a brilliant flower amongst her people, just as her parents are." Said the elf woman with no shame whatsoever.
"I will not have a questionable entity known to misdirect or dissemble have charge of her. Better to anger my husband and keep my daughter's honor intact; he would get over it soon enough if I had reason to suspect your intent. Know that if any such thing happens, I would stand no chance of finding you first if he learned of any acts that impugned her dignity. Bald'rt Iriel holds my daughter first amongst the stars in his eyes." Vedyr warned, the threat gaining magnitude for its nebulous lack of specificity.
This was not news to Ulric, the Elven lord had admitted as much publicly so it was, apparently, common knowledge. It was also a good enough reason to consider his Shadow as eyes only. An unwelcome touch would probably mean she had justification to inform her father that Ulric's ass was grass. If the woman herself didn't pull his heart out of his urethra, let us not forget that part Old Man, he told himself.
Ulric was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to pull off that trick from before, Geyrt would take things slow and steady and shave him apart by the centimeter if it came to it. He knew Brighteyes thought he could take Geyrt evenly but Ulric himself had no such certainty. If he got her good with a spell, maybe. He'd probably lost a great deal of that advantage recently, having shown her most of the spells he was capable of using effectively against her.
"It is not a matter that will arise, I assure you Lady Vedyr. No matter how strangely it has come about, or how much I wish that some other arrangement had been made, the current situation finds me responsible for the care of your daughter and her responsible for my well-being, oddly enough. I will do everything I can to see that she remains hale and whole. Besides, Brighteyes would be hurt if anything happened to her and I like that kid." Ulric said with surety.
Vedyr accepted Ulric's spoken word, her face returning to its passive coolness. At last, she turned the subject away from considerations of Ulric's pre-emptive honor killing and towards his betterment.
"I see now that my husband did not exaggerate your status. You are an anomolous creature. Stats are far outside the norm for your people and a core far more well developed than its unawakened condition should lead me to believe. Tell me, what do you know of a core and of mana?" Lady Vedyr asked, ready at last to instruct.
Holding back a sigh of pure relief Ulric told her what he had hypothesized and what he had been able to observe through his senses.
"I may only speak from the perspective of what I know from my prior life and what I have learned by my own experimentation.” Ulric prefaced, suddenly nervous.
Memories of a dissertation suddenly sprang to mind. However, instead of a groups of stodgy old lifers in the engineering department, there stood a simultaneously intoxicatingly bewitching and flat out terrifying fantasy woman. And she might choose to show him exactly why her mighty husband walked softly around her. What pressure? I don’t feel a thing, nope, cool as a frozen cucumber is Ulric Einar, the disgruntled man noted sarcastically to himself. He took a calming breath and carried on with all the fortitude of a cliff jumper daring the rocks below.
“The core is a sort of living crystal, a semi biological condenser of magic. It tunes to the raw mana of the world and draws it in, somehow, converting it to the body's own mana which may then be used. The body has channels, like blood vessels, that seem to connect through-out the body, allowing mana to move through them, again, sort of like blood. When I first arrived on the plateau, I got some kind of fever from my body not being acclimated to mana circulating through it. After the first time I emptied my core and used magic the sickness went away and my core status changed to "tempered" from "untempered". About mana, I know from the Watcher the main elemental compositions of the world, the gist of the primordial and basic elements. I can feel the different compositions of elements in things around me using my own mana but that's about it. Most of what I can do is based on things that I learned from my old world. It generally works but there are unintended outcomes, frequently."
Vedyr pursed her lips at some of his description, thinking out his statements and turning them to her own interpretations. Eventually she set about explaining the core as the Elves understood it.
"Your thoughts are not, wrong, necessarily. They are, however, highly incomplete, as is understandable for one who has not been given instruction. The core is, as you say, the part of one's body that reaches out to the world, touches the Great Field directly, gathers the ambient mana, refines it, and then stores that mana for use. Many do not learn to utilize that mana in the way that you have done, as a mage does, externally. Most circulate the mana within themselves, building the potency of their bodies, allowing them to be faster and stronger than otherwise, to execute skills of their classes. You know of classes, yes?" She finished, waiting for Ulric's confirmation.
When he gave it, she continued her lesson her tone going to that of a wizened school marm making sure particularly troublesome lads and lasses knew that the paddle was close to hand if they stepped out of line.
"Good. You have a novice class already, no doubt gained from your experiences touching mana on your own and hunting the beasts of the wood and those scum who harmed my son. The classes represent a sort of evolution of the self, a growth into more of what you are or, sometimes, a break from what you were into a new interpretation of yourself. There are traits and skills that are universal to classes, the common features that define this role you have fallen into. Others though are unique, the specific techniques and abilities honed by your particular insights and experiences. Know that the classes are nothing if not variable in nature. There are hundreds of known classes, thousands of permutations. Some are exceedingly common, especially those base classes such as Warrior, Hunter, Mage, and so forth. Some are known to have been held by only a rare few. My husband is one such. There have only been a handful of Moonlit Berserkers, the conditions to walk this path being stringent and specific. And also, hopelessly cruel. It is not a thing to wish on a loved one." Vedyr lectured.
She was surprisingly clear and concise in her explanation, neither being overbroad nor running down rabbit holes that would confuse him with their detail. She continued on to explain the growth of a core, tiers of development, and to give Ulric a warning about his own fate.
"You are at a dangerous place in your development, Ulric Glade Chief. You have learned to harness your core's power and wield it externally but have not reinforced yourself to any significant degree. Many mages do this, but only under the strictest of guidance. To be a feral mage, untrained, unguided, is to walk a razor's edge. It is easy to lose control, to guide mana into a binding, a knot of misconceived power and intent that causes a backlash. Such a backlash can destroy your core easily or turn the flesh to ash. Worse for you, you are drawing more mana in your unawakened core than is safe."
The backlash thing Ulric had felt before, as a result to effectively overcharge spells. Holding the mana that way was difficult and required a lot of focus as well as "stamina" from his core, he got tired and the mana got slippery. Failure sent a shockwave back into the core and had been one of the more distinctly uncomfortable experiences he'd had. Good to know that you could do the same thing when casting spells, it was sounding a lot like doing something about which you had insufficient knowledge was the main cause. So don't get fancy with experimenting unless you’re fresh, got it.
"Safe or not, it appears you are not yet at the point where an awakening of your core to true tier three status is imminent. This you will know for sure, un-aspected mana is wildly reactive to the aspected mana around it. It will naturally seek to harmonize, and your core will want to harmonize with it. In its current state though, it cannot. This builds a tension between your internal mana and the world around you, as the density of the mana within you grows, so will the tension. If you continue to grow in strength your core will reach a threshold where it cannot contain the pure mana and must re-crystalize to a harmonic form, aspecting itself in the process to prevent catastrophic resonances. This is the process for awakening. You can control this process, to an extent, by intentionally tuning all of the mana in your body to a specific form, be it primordial, never do this, elemental, or something esoteric. Surrounding yourself in a place where this particular mana is dense assists greatly. Well. Enough of that, you can discuss elemental theory later with Sister Shor."
Now, Glade Chief, I would like to see these spells that you have in your status. Show me each one, in whatever order that you choose. You don't need to use much strength I only want to see how you are utilizing your mana." His Ruby eyed instructor requested, pointing to the center of the arena.
Ulric focused on his core and pulled gently, not intending to go full power with anything, not yet. Concentrating Ulric pulled mana and harmonized it to Terra, solid and stationary, pulling it into a waste high barrier, that formed a circular ring with [Stone Wall]. The wash of ambient mana made it easier and harder. Easier since he felt like he wasn't needing to draw as much from himself, harder since it had a sort of wild feeling, a coltish excitation that accelerated the flow. He was glad he'd started with something a little on the slow and steady side of things, instead of one of his Ceraun experiments.
Reaching again he tuned his mana towards Caelum, wind, and fired a [Wind Blade] at the stone wall that bit out a thin slice of rock. At that short range the spell didn't have time to accelerate itself to true potency but this was just a demonstration of how he used the mana, not the total effectiveness of the spell. Similarly [Flame Crash] launched with low amounts of mana, was not impressive, merely blackening the stone as it washed over the wall in a small radius. The mana in the room really did take some getting used to, his spells, normally practiced into rote instinct, were squirrely.
Holding both hands out Ulric channeled his core to shift from Incendere, fire, to Aquae, water, releasing a tightly focused [Water Jet] that scoured a gouge out of the burned stone. Having none of either of the two elemental manas freely available to him, unlike the stone and air, Ulric had pulled much more mana to achieve these last two spells. The ambient mana made that much easier he could almost feel his core breathing it in, the hot and cold pulses chewing it into his own un-aspected mana supply before bending it towards his mental constructs.
Now they were coming to the hard part. Ulric started easy, Infrig coating his arm to form [Ice Blade] which he threw at the stone as he had the Beastkin marauder, what felt like years ago. The Cold blade bit into the stone and raised frost around its wound, cracking the rock as it erased the residual heat of the [Flame Crash] and expanded the water remaining inside the [Water Jet] hole freezing it.
Ulric dropped his hands and inhaled deeply a few times, giving himself a moment to gather himself. He hadn't cast like this in a little while and chaining spells was taxing. It inflicted a mental exhaustion on him and that was aside from the actual feeling of losing mana, which was a little like your brain being out of breath.
He pushed on though and approached the stone keeping the feel of Infrig. This was going to be a hard one. Ulric put his hand on the top of the stone and concentrated, creating a marble sized sphere of [Absolute Zero] where his hand touched, for only a moment. Stone froze completely around it, as the small region of total cold was spread into the surrounding material, frozen mist poured away from the site and Ulric easily broke away the section of stone, though he dropped it immediately when he felt the burning cold of it on his skin. The stone disintegrated into dust as it fell, hitting the ground as a cloud of particles that poofed to join the fog around the cold mass.
Vedyr had watched with an even expression thus far but when she saw [Absolute Zero] her eyes went wide and she nearly took a step forward before catching herself and settling back into her examination. If she liked that, she was about to get a real show.
Placing his hands together, Ulric carefully drew his mana to tune Ceraun. It felt almost hungry in this environment, like the ambient mana made the very air more conductive. He trusted his instincts on this and spread his hands to allow [Voltaic Grip] to climb arcing between them. Concentrating hard he pulled the mana inwards and inflected [Voltaic Grip] into its newest form, the dozens of searing white arcs collapsing into a single thicker ribbon of flickering power that Ulric pushed to leap into the stone where it skipped, almost joyfully, to its own crackling song across the surface, leaving a scorched, nearly molten mark at its touch, the manifestation of his [Voltaic Riot].
On the home stretch now and feeling fairly good, almost like he had when he'd gone for his sprint earlier, Ulric bent down to pick up a small piece of broken rock. He was going to need a target for this next one. Vedyr was safely behind him so he wasn't as afraid of shrapnel this time, the small handful of stone didn't have enough mass to it to probably do much damage. Not in as many pieces as it was about to be.
Again, Ulric imagined the whirling spiral, black following white, positive leading negative on a merry chase through the held stone, building the link between his budding lightning and its soon to be ground. The atmosphere changed as the charge built, even as hard as Ulric was fighting it to stay contained small arcs jumped from his hand into the air, the raw potential giving the air a nearly metallic flavor. Ceraun raced from his core through its tightening loop imposing his will on the physical forces of the world, bringing the electromagnetic to heel. It took less time now, here in this place, than it ever had and Ulric was glad to relieve the pressure as he flung the stone hard and released his grip.
[Lightning Javelin] ripped a crackling line through the air to destroy the thrown rock. Tiny fragments pelted Ulric's blocking hand but were too small to do damage. Thunder roared through the arena echoing in the space aggressively. The air itself seemed to soak up some of the released energy deadening it or Ulric was pretty sure he would have had an blown ear drum.
That last spell took all he had left, he was at mana exhaustion. Even in this place where the air hummed with magic he couldn't run through his entire spell list without being completely drained, not as taxing as the advanced Infrig and Ceraun spells were on his mana supply. Outside of this wyrd amphitheater he doubted he could have managed these last two spells. Headache throbbing and the beating core fatigue dragging his energy down, Ulric turned to his instructor to give her a thumbs up.
Vedyr Iriel looked like she was chewing the air, shock written across her face. Lady Bathe dropped from the air to land next to her sister-wife, looking for the source of the blast.
From the air? Ulric questioned. Did she just jump from all the way over there? His mind was still trying to wrap itself around that when Shor approached in a stately saunter with Geyrt in tow.
Ulric's shadow was mumbling behind her keeper in Elvish. Ulric couldn't quite catch it from that distance but he heard "Told you", "senseless", and "monster" in there somewhere. That was quite the complement if anybody asked him, especially in light of Brighteyes' mother superman jumping around the place. As they closed in on him, Ulric noticed that he was distinctly outnumbered on the sexes front. If all four of them descended on him with their henpecking they'd make short work of him, and he committed to a tried and true strategy of nods and "Yes ma'm"s for the forseeable future.
