As it turned out, Lucan didn’t have much natural talent when it came to the art of woodworking. Or maybe trying to craft a mock blade that was the length of a longsword while having the thickness of a dagger was just a difficult endeavor, because Lucan kept shaving off too much off the double-sided blade’s edges and too little near the hilt, despite having the real blade, which he’d begun calling Nacht— which meant night in the now defunct northern tongue.
Swift and silent, Nacht would strike unassumingly as it would accurately. Or so Lucan hoped, as he wrapped his dominant hand around the makeshift hilt of the poorly crafted practice sword.
Having made sure that his room’s curtains were drawn and his door was locked, for once Lucan was thankful for the oversized dimensions of his room. He wouldn’t be doing laps inside anytime soon, but there was enough room to practice with his makeshift wooden sword without knocking over fine display vases or random pieces of furniture. His minimalistic taste wasn’t exactly befitting a noble, but in this case, it would do him fine.
Taking a deep breath to center himself, Lucan lowered his center of gravity, bending his knees to assume a more flexible stance.
“This is it,” He mumbled under his breath.
With the hilt of his blade gripped at the navel level, Lucan’s mock longblade was pointed at the throat of an illusory opponent.
Then, for the first time in his life, Lucan slashed with a sword.
Too weak, Lucan thought as he concluded the sword slash with his dominant hand completely extending to his side.
Turning his wrist inwards, he brought the sword into a downward angling slash, making sure that the tempo of his slash was marginally faster than the opening slash.
I feel like I’ve done this before, but the sensation is vague,” Lucan assessed. My arms don’t have the strength they should have, the height my sword is flowing from feels off and the force generated from my swings is pitiful.
He plumbed the depths of his memories for Silvas Anderle’s movements from when he was refining a style of his own and they answered his call.
Lucan’s blade traced its path in reverse, as he executed an upwards angling slash.
Finally, he took a step back to bring his sword above his head and slash down in a perfectly straight cut, which would have split the opponent in two had his earlier slash succeeded in disarming them.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, Lucan thought as he executed his fastest slash so far, enough to send a weak gust of wind flitting outwards from the arc of his sword slash.
He took another step back and recentered his blade so that he was holding the hilt at his navel level, before repeating the sideways slash he had opened the sword form with.
Tempest Codex Art— First Form, Gathering Storm.
As he continued practicing, his sword strokes got increasingly quicker and Lucan added more and more variations to his slashes, out of the thirty six variations Silvas Anderle had cobbled together from various sword arts and his own growing understanding as an aura expert.
As he grew more fluent with the sword strokes, Lucan began experimenting with the tempo, picking up pace only to abruptly slow down with his follow up slash, all while continuing to retreat.
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The purpose of Gathering Storm was to make the enemy tire themselves and expend their aura core as they chased after you, while also unleashing a flurry of light slashes to help the Aura Expert accustom himself to the style of the enemy while also increasing the chances of them revealing an opening.
Lucan could recall how, using merely the first form of the Tempest Codex Art, a younger Silvas Anderle had danced around three Aura Knights of the same stage as him. A single light strike would disrupt two enemy swords at once, while the third blade would be caught by the retreating swipe of his blade.
No matter what the other Aura Knights, students that should have been an equal match for Silvas Anderle if their stage alone was considered, did, they could not breach the adaptive first form of the Tempest Codex Art.
And Lucan knew that the performance he displayed was merely that— a performance. If it had been a real battle, Silvas Anderle would have taken advantage of the openings Gathering Storm revealed to him, striking them down with a single thrust each.
But when it came to Lucan’s version of Gathering Storm, his movements were jerky and unrefined, in comparison to a graceful dance that circled around the battlefield. He could practice and hammer out the kinks in his form, yet every ounce of his instincts screamed that no matter how many times he swung the sword, he wouldn’t reach the level Silvas Anderle had, as a student in the imperial academy.
Was the lack of an aura core the reason why his Gathering Storm felt so hollow—- merely an imitation of the whole, lacking any understanding of the mechanics behind it.
Lucan’s reverie was forcibly shattered as his back thumped against the wall and his blade, which was in mid-swing, paused.
“It doesn’t make sense,” A panting Lucan muttered. The lack of aura is an answer, but it is only part of it. I have Silvas Anderle’s memories, yet… I don’t know how it feels to have the wind itself aid me in my sword dance, for it to empower the quickness of the blade and make me fleet of foot when I need it. I know what Silvas meditated upon for hours on end,multiple times in a week, but all I can recall is a mesh of thoughts and images on the aspects of nature, on its infinite nuances. Fragments of imagery, bursts of realization, the satisfaction of solving one mystery only to stumble upon another, far more complex one, all pieces of a puzzle that eludes me the more I try to grasp it.
“Except it does,” He realized, his eyes widening as he lowered his longblade. Aura was an energy that met regular mana and heavy mana in the middle, which made it the energy closest to nature itself that humans could utilize. Upon transitioning from a Mana Core to an Aura Core, all affinities were erased, yet that didn’t mean that Aura Knights could not draw upon elemental affinities in battle— even children knew that much.
When Silvas Anderle slashed his blade, his Aura was attuned to the wind element— but that wasn’t all. No, the wind around him synchronized with his longblade, his years of meditation aiding him in conveying his will to an element of nature itself by moving along the same wavelengths.
Unlike mages, who focused on chaining spell matrices together into complete, coherent magic circles that imposed their will onto the world, Aura knights did not have natural elemental affinities to rely upon. Neither was their art one of calculation, as even the greatest of Grand-Master Mages could not move heavy mana to their own will, for it was the lifeblood of the world itself, predating even the earliest of recorded histories.
But Aura was not Heavy mana.
It was a hybrid borne out of a mortal’s natural potential intermingling with the limitless lifeblood of the world itself, an energy that existed in between the two in classification.
When Silvas Anderle attuned his Aura to the wind element, he wasn’t forcing the wind to dance to his rhythm. No, he was demonstrating the understanding he had gained of the element across years of meditation and too many life and death battles to count, of the wind’s nature— the gentle wind, the sharp wind, the chilly wind, its patterns, the truth it spoke of behind its whispers and the fundamental nature of its very existence itself.
Yet, who could truly predict which way the wind would blow, each and every single time unerringly?
No, what Silvas Anderle attuned his Aura to wasn’t the wind element, but multiple aspects of it that he cycled across according to need and the limitations of his understanding.
So when Silvas Anderle fought with the Tempest Codex Art— First Form, Gathering Storm, the Wind’s aspect of Quickness danced with him as his Aura ensconced his entire body.
With his back against the wall, Lucan slowly slid to the ground.
