Somnial’s condition drove me to change up my safe plan of learning spells the slow and steady way, and I returned to my room with a new grimoire from his library: [Minor Healing].

  I had intended on mastering elemental magic first, but if I could learn a little bit of healing magic, maybe I could help my sponsor keep his health. [Minor Healing] was rated as a 15-Will spell, which just went to show how impressive the [Saint] really was, but fortunately, thanks to my training, I could just about manage that.

  The spell was long and complex. I started reading it, and immediately noticed how different it was from anything else I had learned before. The create and control spells all shared a somewhat similar flow, but this was unlike anything I had cast so far. It was going to take more than a term to learn this spell. I just hoped I had that much time, and that it could help.

  Winter term came to an end, leaving me with time to train and study over the short spring break. I was making progress on both [Minor Healing] and my pursuit of [Dual Wielding], though I still hadn’t acquired the skill.

  Tory had been a decent teacher, and I was a good student, eagerly lapping up the forms she taught me. I could now whiz through all of them, and had a reasonable sense of when to use each depending on the circumstances. Unbeknownst to her, I also had the mirror versions of each of these forms drilled in from additional private training, leveraging my [Ambidexterity].

  Yet I still hadn’t acquired the skill. Thinking back to both levels of my [Swordsmanship], I had been a bit worried I would need to track down and fight a monster in order for it to pop, but I knew from my other skills that it wasn’t strictly speaking necessary to be in actual danger to learn skills. I didn’t think physical combat skills were special in that way, or training the soldiers for the army would have been a challenge. Those battles had just been the element I needed to grow.

  If I can figure out what would push me beyond my current limits, I’m sure I can get this skill, I thought while going through the day’s training.

  “Tory,” I said when we were winding down. “I’d like to have a serious spar with you.”

  “Oh?” the mercenary said, grinning. “You think you’re ready for that?”

  “To win? Probably not. But… I bet I can land a strike on you,” I said, matching her grin.

  We faced off, opposite each other across the courtyard. At her mark, we began.

  I kicked off, racing towards Tory, who was moving to meet me in return. Our twin training blades slammed into each other at our initial clash, my two-handed strike meeting her two-handed guard. Unleashing a flurry of strikes, I wailed against her defenses, getting a measure of her speed and habits.

  With a step back, I was put on the defensive as she took the initiative, and it was all I could do to block and counter her strikes. I wagered she was only attacking with half her strength, if even, still taking it easy on me.

  That was fine. I didn’t think her under-estimating would make a difference, so long as I could land a hit on her.

  After her prolonged assault, which I barely survived, she slipped back into a defensive stance, and despite my aching arms I forced myself to attack. I would only have a small window of leveraging her fatigue, minor as it was, to land a hit. With my advanced control of my mana circuit, I had started experimenting with using mana to supplement my natural abilities. Mostly, this let me push harder at the end of my runs and workouts. I spun up my mana circuit, pushing my body with [Mana Manipulation], burning a small amount of mana to shore up my stamina.

  Tory raised her eyebrows as my returned assault came more heavily than she had expected, and I leaned in with my right arm strikes. I slammed down with my heaviest blows, only following with weak secondary probes and jabs with my left. Slowly, I felt her defenses shore up against my right, and relax with lighter parries when I struck with my left.

  That’s my cue, I thought, and switched to a southpaw stance. I feinted with my right, forcing her guard up slightly, then using the full force of my [Ambidexterity] boosted second dominant arm, I whipped my left blade towards her thigh.

  She took a half step back, in surprise, and the blade only slid across her leg rather than slam into it.

  It was enough. I felt everything I had learned from the woman coalesce into a fully formed skill.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Tory said with a smile. “You got me. Judging by the look on your face, I take it you got the skill, too.”

  I beamed, nodding. It was a subtly different effect than [Ambidexterity] which only let me use either hand as my dominant, but still fundamentally approached my efforts as leading with one or the other. As I moved through one of my forms, I could feel the slight change to my natural state. My arms, in unison, were simultaneously leading. Each movement of either side was part of a greater whole.

  The skill didn’t seem entirely limited to combat, either. For example, [Ambidexterity] allowed me to write with either hand, but I would still only comfortably write with one hand at a time, whichever one I chose. With [Dual Wielding], I could imagine writing with both hands at the same time, albeit only vaguely. That wasn’t the most productive use of the skill, but it was still amazing that I could somewhat split my focus across both hands and actually accomplish things instead of just making a mess of whatever I was working on.

  At the moment, it only seemed to really help when I was trying to do the same thing, more or less, with similar items in both hands. Unlike [Ambidexterity], this was an active skill with growth potential, so that stood to possibly change as I developed it over time.

  The sound of steady clapping drew my attention across the courtyard, and Byron walked over. “I’m glad I caught that,” he said, nodding to Tory before looking back to me. “I suppose you’ll need a second sword now.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “About that,” I said. “There’s something I wanted to ask you about…”

  * * *

  After the break, I was officially a third year student. It was my final year as an academy junior. The classes were rearranged again, and sadly, I wasn’t in Felton’s class this year. Ramius was back in my class, but sans Pellia, unfortunately for him. He continued to respectfully ignore me, which was fine. Class became even less interesting without my best friend, but I put the work in and spent the rest of my time studying the healing spell.

  Somnius was my magic professor, yet again, and I grew even more confident the man was following me through my academy career. Oh well, at least Felton gets someone else this year.

  There were no surprises when it came to his classes; we were learning the incantation for [Create Stone], which was a 6-Will spell, so slightly more difficult than [Create Ice] but otherwise pretty comparable. I wouldn’t know for sure until summer term, but I was pretty confident that they had a similar approach, with the demands of conjuring stone simply a little higher than the demands of conjuring frozen water.

  About a week after classes restarted, Byron picked me up after school as we had planned that morning and together we headed through Ivarnel’s market, towards the fancy shops. As we stepped out of the carriage, I looked up at the weapon shop.

  This time, it was the fancy weapon shop, not the cheaper one a few streets over where I had gone to sell my goblin swords. I stepped inside with confidence; they were expecting me.

  “Welcome, master Tovar,” the shopkeeper said. “Our smiths have finished up with your order, if you’ll just give me a moment to fetch it.”

  The shopkeeper brought out my new weapons, laying them out on the counter, and I looked over them in amazement.

  One of the only things I brought back with me from Obdorn, in lieu of my hand, were the mandibles that had taken it from me. Now, with my hand restored, I intended to make use of my former enemy’s weapons.

  Each sword was still vaguely shaped like the mandible it had been made of, but refined. They were slightly smoothed out, slimmed down, and straightened. The base of each had been shaved down so that a guard and handle could be fit, and a pommel had been added as a counterweight to the blade.

  “The process of working with mana-made monster parts is different than man-mined materials,” the shopkeep explained as he gestured to the shape. “Melting down and recasting mana-made metal like this would effectively ruin the material, as would heating it to the point of completely reforging it.”

  I had read a bit about this in a book in the school’s library, and it didn’t explain the reasoning behind this, but I was pretty sure I knew the cause. The monster part retained some element of the monster’s original mana circuit, so long as it wasn’t completely remade, the act of which would completely break down the circuit and render the material inert.

  This mana-made, semi-organic metal wasn’t naturally superior to the metals humans used for weapons in this world, whatever it was composed of at the elemental level. It was lighter and weaker, at least when inert. The real strength of the monster material was the in-built mana circuit.

  When charged with mana, it strengthened the material, to the point where the Nightmare Ant soldier had easily cut through my forearm.

  The shopkeeper continued. “As you can see, we streamlined the shape while retaining the curved outline, and sharpened both sides. The hilt is mostly other monster parts, as requested; the handle is made from peryton antler, and wrapped in taur leather. The guard and pommel are made from bronze.”

  I nodded. The bronze was fine, but the handle being made from monster parts should improve the flow of mana.

  By not reforging the metal and merely grinding and sanding it into shape, the natural mana circuit would remain mostly intact, and by being joined with the hilt materials, I believed it would slowly integrate the other components, especially through use over time. In the same way that building a house gave the structure a type of new mana circuit which slowed mana decay, creating and using an item would also develop its own mana circuit.

  Technically, this would also be true of the monster metal even if it were completely reforged, but since the metal wouldn’t have enough strength to be used as a sword while the circuit developed, it would never develop a mana circuit that would allow it to surpass its mundane nature. At least, all the Argadian experimentation with monster parts that I had read about suggested as much. I was doing a lot of guesswork.

  Retaining as much of the natural state of the material as possible should also retain its usability, though, and the Nightmare Ant soldier mandibles were naturally devastatingly sharp. If the sword integrated the mana circuits of the handle material and wrap, it could even extend into the bronze over time, unifying the weapon into something akin to a pseudoartifact. There weren’t many examples in the literature of this, but there were enough that I was confident enough to invest in it and find out.

  Well, invest Somnial’s money. It was yet another gift from the Great Sage and Byron, to celebrate my new skill.

  “When you pick these up, you may feel a draw on your mana. Using them will fatigue you in a different way from a normal sword, despite the difference in weight. Of course, the Sage Apprentice surely has the Will to spare,” the shopkeep said.

  I winced at the title. It wasn’t the first time someone called me that, but it always felt undeserved. I nodded at the man, though. My Will was part of why I thought this could work for me.

  Argadians didn’t truly understand the nature of mana circuits, but they understood more or less how artifacts worked. The mana measurement device I had been tested on and the communication mirror Byron used to speak with Somnial were both actual artifacts, and humans only needed to touch them and concentrate for the artifact to draw mana from the user and engage. The artifacts likely contained complex mana circuits which would passively draw from the closest active source of mana. The same would be true of this monster-made sword; whoever held it with intent to use would become a battery for the circuit, feeding it with their mana and reinforcing the concept into reality thanks to their Will.

  Admittedly, my interest in this was mostly because it was just extremely cool, and I loved the idea of turning my former enemy’s strength into my own by turning the mandibles into blades.

  My mandiblades. The wordplay didn’t work in Argadian, but that’s what I named them anyway.

  I picked them up, and felt the weapons pull from my mana circuit. I allowed them to passively take from me, and could practically feel the blade becoming sharper in my grip. “Do you have something I can test this on?”

  The shopkeep led me to a small courtyard behind the shop, where they had set up some bundles of straw and some thin wooden boards. The straw fell effortlessly to my mandiblades, but they would have to most any blade with a reasonable edge. I took a swing at the board, and the mandiblade sunk in about halfway.

  I wiggled the mandiblade out, then set my stance and tried again. With a bit more force, I cleaved through the board.

  “Do you have any scrap metal? Maybe a blade which needs to be reforged?” I asked, turning back to the shopkeeper.

  He frowned. “I, well, wouldn’t want you to damage your new blades,” he said nervously.

  I stopped myself from shaking my head. The people who worked on this probably thought that I intended to keep them as an art piece or something, but they were way off. “I’ll take responsibility for it.”

  The shopkeeper returned with a blade which had a pretty bad crack running through it, and we clamped it into place where I had chopped through the wood board.

  I tapped it lightly with my mandiblades, while the shopkeep looked on with concern plain on his face. He was probably right to be worried; for anyone else, they would be more likely to damage the newly made “weapon” than cut through the metal.

  Closing my eyes, I prodded at the twin swords made of monster parts in my hand with [Mana Manipulation], feeling out the connection which was drawing down my mana. I found the flow, and extended my own mana circuit into it, pushing my Will into the weapons.

  In my hands, I felt the pair of mandiblades take on my Will, learning from my intent while remembering their origin, and they ever so slightly shifted towards their promised purpose. The mana circuit shone in my mind’s eye, and with a rapid strike, I brought the pair down on their target.

  I opened my eyes, looking down at the damaged blade, which had been cut cleanly into three pieces.

  “They’re perfect,” I said, turning back to the surprised man with a huge grin on my face. “Now, about their sheaths…”

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