Rosy's day was suddenly not as good as she was hoping for. The Master in front of her had an impassive face, one that never twitched even when she dashed at him with three active skills.

  Just how high was this guy's Perception!?

  Shaking her head slightly, she cleared all useless thoughts and squared off again, standing a few dozen meters away. Lightning crackled in that extremely strong glaive of his, somehow never leaving the blade despite visibly flowing through its enchantments.

  With a grunt, she lunged again. Her active skill, Rapid Acceleration, wasn't even pushed to the limits as she moved, just barely able to keep track of her surroundings. More points in Perception were needed to keep up with the evolution, something she noted in the back of her mind as their weapons met.

  Each impact sent jolts down her arms, and she had to adapt on the fly when they, contrary to her expectations, didn't hurt at all. If anything, her vastly stronger body weathered them without protest, eager to deliver even more force.

  Turning up her enhancements slightly, she kicked the ground hard enough to try and unbalance the barrier mage, only for him to take flight. Accounting for that, her sword moved in an upward diagonal slash. Lev reacted with the same casualness as before, pulling his legs higher instead of ascending.

  The sword passed below him harmlessly, and his counter was just barely evaded by another application of her movement skill. She was also expecting the wall that tried to block her, tackling it away with her shoulder to make distance.

  A pointy rope descended from above, not imbued with lightning like she usually saw it. She batted it aside without much trouble, only for a dozen to replace it.

  Mana streamed into her sword, pushing its sharpness enchantments to the maximum. With its high speed, the ropes were cleanly cut through one after another, opening her up enough for the Master to close the distance.

  Yeah… Rosy smiled a little to herself, feeling that Lev was even faster than before. I'm never going to win against him.

  It was still good practice, though, so she put the doubts out of her mind and strained all of her skills to the current limit, bogged down by her low Perception.

  ****

  Lev was acutely aware of how quickly he was reaching his limits. The current speed and strength were born of maximum lightning imbuement combined with the enhancement formation, and he would rather not resort to blue fire because of its destructive tendencies.

  Fortunately, both he and Rosy were evenly matched, even if he could feel her improving with every passing minute. Her skills were new to her, and so was the increased effectiveness of attributes. No doubt, if she had a few weeks to adapt to the evolution, Lev would need to pull out all the stops just to match her.

  In terms of physical strength, that is. When the rest of his class was considered, he could blow her up from several kilometers away, as unhealthy as that thought was.

  Agonizingly slow seconds ticked over, turning into ten minutes of high-intensity combat as neither went for killing blows. Instead, they just traded moves, both learning and teaching each other their flaws.

  "That's enough," Lev said once his mana dipped to 90%. Keeping up that much physical strength was really taxing on his body's reserves.

  In comparison, Rosy was breathing heavily, leaning on her greatsword as drops of sweat flowed down her neck.

  "Wooh," she breathed out with a big smile. "That was fun!"

  "It was," Lev nodded with a polite smile. "Your evolution is quite remarkable."

  "I know, right?" she exclaimed and skipped towards her team. "Thank you!"

  He just watched her go and once again fall into discussions with her team. Lev didn't partake in the conversation, knowing that his presence amidst that friend group would only make things needlessly awkward.

  Instead, he cycled mana into his armor and considered the enchantments.

  At this point, there's nothing more I can improve in the enhancement formation. It has hit its limit, which means I need to create my own version of it to advance further.

  The task was daunting. Enough so that he felt somewhat lost about where to start. Fortunately, the rune collection Drakys had given him had a prototype of another version of the enhancement formation, one designed to accommodate different mana types.

  Let's see, he summoned the tome and skipped to the pages containing the second enhancement formation. There are only a few differences.

  Mainly, there were new mana flow runes, as well as different designs for the elements to display the properties of imbuement. The enhancement runes were the same, and so were the control runes responsible for using the entire formation.

  Things became trickier when he considered the added complexity. Even if the runes themselves were simple, they were integrated into what was a vastly denser formation, one requiring half again as much space as the current formation.

  Needless to say, he needed to start testing the various runes with smaller constructs to get a feel for them. His orbs, ones that were always running in the background, were good test subjects.

  Which reminds me, he thought, and called his bubble lower. One of the orbs flew out of it, already filled with a trickle of lightning to channel throughout it all. The mana flowed through the first three layers easily enough before reaching the fourth, where it was divided into fourteen little bolts.

  All of them moved at once. Lev's brows furrowed, requiring all of his attention to keep the bolts from colliding with each other. The current amount was the highest he had tried to manipulate so far, and the difficulty spoke for itself.

  Perception was stretched to the limits as he closed his eyes. Given his recent upgrades in Mana Perception, the mini bolts were way more visible to him than they would be in his eyesight.

  Each was moving close to their maximum speed in the dense channels, slowed at the right moments to not clash with other bolts. Lev's willpower was taxed the most, though still not enough to really feel any lethargy or tiredness.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  He knew for a fact that overusing willpower resulted in a fatigue similar to mana overuse. Instead of the mind, however, it was one's entire body that felt sluggish, too lazy to do anything else.

  Almost like it depletes the resolve, he thought absently, keeping up the training exercise for another few seconds before one of the bolts inevitably clashed. The sudden impact made him lose control over the rest, too, which made them disperse.

  Eleven seconds.

  That was his current record with fourteen bolts. In his humble opinion, that was pretty good. Manipulating mana with such precision was quite demanding, and he had to blink a few times to push through the fog encroaching on his consciousness.

  Asta, the final mage of the team, refrained from sparring. Jared was the only one left, but the mage had different plans.

  "I'm more than happy with just a straightforward experimentation session," the gravity mage said, both he and Lev seated on barrier chairs to decide how to test his evolution. "Frankly, a few of your walls will probably be enough to negate most of my attacks, and that's not even taking into account your armor. My skills are more geared towards flexibility now instead of pure raw power, though I also have a bunch of that with the new boost to my mana capacity."

  "What's the final number?"

  "150%," Jared replied with obvious pride. "That's pretty good, right?"

  Lev nodded twice. "It really is. You are the second person I have seen with a mana capacity boost outside of arcane classes."

  "Huh," Jared smiled to himself, considering the information. "What about you?"

  Are you sure you want to ask that? Lev mused, debating if he wanted to answer. He did anyway, for his silence would mean pretty much the same thing as his words.

  "Mine's at 250% capacity and 100% regeneration."

  "… Wow," Jared blinked twice. "And you have a Wisdom Boost on top of that. I'll be damned…"

  Lev waited for a few moments, and when the gravity mage's expression started to dim, he flicked the side of Jared's head.

  "Ow. What?"

  Lev didn't answer, only staring flatly at the other mage.

  "… What?" Jared asked again, now squirming a little under the barrier mage's gaze.

  Lev didn't let up, only looking into his eyes to prove a point. Jared knew very well what was going through his head, too.

  "Alright, alright. I won't compare myself to a legend in the making," he chuckled, shaking his head at the absurdity of the statement. "It's gonna take a while to wrap my head around that."

  "Be as it may," Lev got up and formed different manner of constructs. "All of the Exalted got where they are without a Wisdom Boost, and my class benefits are relatively normal. They aren't a requirement for greatness."

  "Yes, sir," the man sarcastically replied. At least he recognized the truth in those words, which was enough for Lev.

  The first construct was his usual shield. Jared gathered a bit of gravity mana in front of him, shaped it into an arrow, and fired. Much faster than before, it punctured the shield in a blink before flying off into the distance, covering a few dozen meters before falling apart.

  A good start, Lev nodded to himself and moved the next construct to the first's location. It was an enchanted shield with durability doubled with the standalone rune.

  Once again, the gravity arrow smashed into it, putting a hole through the construct. The resistance was high enough that the shield shattered instead of being pierced cleanly, and they moved on after noting the result.

  Next up, he had a "normally" enchanted shield, one holding a full formation meant to absorb impacts and be almost thrice as durable as an unenchanted counterpart.

  This time, the arrow faltered. It landed in the dead center with a smack, cracking the construct, but not enough to disable its enchantments or push it to the brink of shattering.

  Still, the gravity mana is really good at rumbling the entire constructs. It literally seeps into the shields to break them inside out.

  The likely explanation was that Jared's gravity mana also utilized waves that pushed into the barrier structure, weakening it.

  Far from done, the gravity mage simply formed a bigger arrow as Lev repaired the shield. The construct was blown to bits this time, though the projectile also dissipated upon impact. All things considered, that trade was largely in Lev's favor.

  "That was the strongest shield I currently use," Lev added, in case Jared didn't realize how strong his attacks actually were. "You can probably kill centipedes with the smaller arrows now."

  "You think so?" the man asked thoughtfully. "The wind mana coating their bodies wasn't that strong against my element before. Hmm."

  That was easy.

  Not saying anything else, Lev brought the first of his walls next to him. It was unenchanted and way larger than the shield, nearly four times as wide. Jared fired one of his larger arrows at it, putting a big dent in the middle of the wall. A second arrow at the same location pierced through while also shattering a large portion of the construct.

  "How much mana do you have left?" Lev asked while preparing the next one.

  "I've only used about a twentieth so far," the gravity mage replied, unable to hold back a grin as he repeatedly felt for his much larger pool. "Still got plenty in me."

  Given Jared's unfamiliarity with the new improvements, they decided to skip a few steps. Gravity mana was versatile, able to affect the weight of items, objects, and living beings to a certain extent, while also creating artificial suction points by creating a condensed ball of gravity mana, yet they weren't interested in that.

  The element's offensive power wasn't in doubt, and in time, the mage would learn the ins and outs of his evolution. What they were interested in, however, was the highest output. A dangerous monster could show up at any moment, and Jared wanted to have enough of a handle on dumping mana into his spells for them not to blow up in his face.

  Being a testing dummy suited Lev just fine.

  Priming his armor and powering up all the plates, he made sure that all of the enchantments were fully operational before nodding at the gravity mage. Jared took a deep breath, audible despite the twenty meters separating them, and raised his right arm.

  Palm facing towards Lev, gravity mana slowly seeped out of his body before gathering at a singular point. The amount was compressed until a small round pebble took form, and layers upon layers of mana were stacked on top of it until it was the size of an orange.

  By now, everyone had stopped what they were doing to observe the spectacle. Non-combatants watched from atop the distant carts, whereas Jared's team remained ready to intervene at a moment's notice.

  Jared himself wasn't aware of any of that. All of his attention was concentrated on the gravity orb that expanded rapidly, now in the final phases of preparations. The mage released another large burst of mana, empowering the attack to a ridiculous degree, before firing it at Lev.

  Fraying at the seams, the orb packed enough mana to rival one of Lev's extremely overloaded finisher lances. It tore through the air as it continued to expand, the orb turning into a giant oval egg that was as tall as Lev and similarly wide, and also attracted decimated the ground in its passing due to its own local gravity.

  Before any of the destroyed chunks of dirt or stone could fly into the gravity mana, it landed on Lev's crossed arms. All of his absorption enchantments were filled to the brim from that single impact, one pushing the air out of his lungs. The orb didn't care for the small obstacle, dragging Lev along its trajectory with minimal effort.

  Dozens of meters passed underneath them as he mentally resisted the attack's momentum, pushing it back by manipulating his armor. His efforts were eventually rewarded as they slowed after a long distance, almost halting the attack.

  That was apparently the limit of the orb's structure as it exploded. Gravity mana roared out in spades in every direction, rattling his teeth as it rushed through his armor. The impact-resistant suit underneath the armor tried its best to shield him from the worst of it, and even the barrier armor was pushed beyond its limits as it continued to absorb the insane amounts of physical force trying to break it apart.

  The quantity of absorbed kinetic energy reached a point where too much force was channeled through his runes. Many of them melted from the strain, unable to handle the raw power, which caused a chain effect.

  Within instants, his armor was far too overloaded. It blew up in a large wave of pure mana, releasing it all outward. That was enough to blast through the remaining gravity mana, dispersing the vestiges of the orb and revealing the crater Lev suddenly plopped down in.

  ...

  … What the fuck?