21 – Time Passes

The following days were unfortunately quite a bit more boring than his first lesson with Igrette. After that mock spar, she never had him train in combat like that anymore. She said that she had never intended to teach him anything more than basic stances and striking form, and since he already had those down, there was nothing for him to learn. Not until he had at least a working understanding of his own anatomy.

Luckily, that did not mean that their lessons outside were ending, and as much as Jonny hated to admit it, he had Tommy to thank for that. Jonny might not have had much left to learn, but Tommy did, so they still held brief combat lessons outside. Jonny mostly tuned Igrette out and focused on punching and kicking the straw dummy she had brought, but he occasionally checked in to see how Tommy was doing. The answer was… not great.

Tommy wasn’t unathletic, and he was fairly active, but it seemed to Jonny like he had no talent for this. Maybe it was just because he was young, but Tommy did not seem to understand the application of bodily force. He didn’t understand how to rotate through his hips, or drive with his legs, and he was terrible at keeping his arms properly aligned. He was improving steadily with Igrette’s instruction, but his natural understanding of how his body worked seemed severely lacking.

Jonny took great pleasure in that, and it was not entirely shadenfreude. The other half of their combat lessons, the anatomy half, was a place where Tommy excelled and Jonny struggled. Jonny had a good intuitive understanding of his body, but trying to memorize the diagrams Igrette showed, and knowing how each muscle, tendon, and ligament connected, and how many bones were in each limb and things like that had his head swimming. Meanwhile, after just three days of study, Tommy was able to rattle off the names of almost every bone in the human body, and half the muscles.

At first, it annoyed Jonny to no end. Igrette would sometimes do “quiz games” where she would show an unlabeled diagram, point to a random muscle or bone, and ask them to identify it. The first to name it correctly won, and of course, that was almost always Tommy. With the verdict being a given most of the time, Jonny wondered why even do the games, until he realized that he was actually studying much harder for the sole purpose of beating Tommy. It was still annoying to constantly lose, though, especially with how smug Tommy always acted.

As the weeks went on, however, Jonny’s annoyance lessened, and Tommy’s smug cheerfulness began to fade. This was because they had finally started doing some rudimentary internal mana techniques, and ironically, Tommy’s ability to accurately identify any body part in an instant did not seem to help him much at all.

The techniques they practiced were simple to the point of tedium, and they were not practical in the slightest, but Jonny actually had a lot of fun with them, mostly because of how much better he was at them than Tommy. Sure, he might not have known the name of the tendon that connected his bicep to his elbow, but he could send mana there quite easily. Tommy, on the other hand knew its name, but it always took him a few seconds to get the mana there.

The back and forth competitive nature of the lessons managed to keep what would have been fairly boring content interesting, and as the days grew shorter and nights grew colder, Jonny and Tommy both steadily progressed.

And internal mana techniques were not the only things that Jonny was learning. While that took up the majority of his mornings, he actually spent much more time on something entirely different: his mana.

He was still making his usual progress in terms of condensing it. His capacity was significantly higher than it had been, and when he cycled and condensed his mana, he could get it almost a third of the way toward the density that made up Tommy’s core. That should have been enough to form a core, since having mana that dense throughout his body would imply he could make it much more dense in a smaller area, but it still refused to coalesce.

Jonny had idly wondered if perhaps he could force a core layer formation if he forced his mana inward. It would cause a mana surge, which was dangerous, and at these levels, would make him literally explode, but what if he could harness it? What if that mana surge was exactly what he needed to form his core? What if the intensity of the surge was exactly what he needed to condense his mana into that layer in his stomach?

He had gone as far as to tentatively push his mana toward his core, seeing if there might be any natural process that could help him, but all he got was an overwhelming sense of wrongness, and a bit of shaking in his hands as his body instinctively recognized what he was trying to do. He never tried that again. Igrette’s words still rang in his ears, telling him to trust his instincts, and his instincts were telling him that doing that was a very bad idea.

One thing his instincts were telling him was good was the breathing he had done out in the woods when Tommy formed his core. He had no idea why it was good, but it felt good to breathe like that, so he did it. When he was sitting down to eat, when he was laying down to sleep, when he was listening to Igrette talk about how the body worked… He had even recently started doing it while during his workouts.

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So far, the breathing was doing nothing noteworthy for him. He felt like he was maybe getting a little better at controlling his mana as a whole, just from the constant ebb and flow, but that was about it. For now. He had a feeling he was on to something, and was just on the verge of some kind of breakthrough.

One thing that he had already theorized was potentially using this in the future during actual fighting. Just like Tommy had used it to compress his mana and pull it in, Jonny could also use his breathing technique to compress his mana, and the compressed mana on his inhalation was denser than anything he could do normally. If he could use that to strengthen his body, he was sure he could get a much greater boost than usual.

Sadly, testing that would have to wait. Currently, even his ordinary compressed mana was too much for his body to handle, so until his body got strong enough, or he mastered the internal mana techniques Igrette was teaching him, that would have to remain a theory. Or perhaps a last resort in case of danger.

While Jonny studied his breathing and continued training his body, he found himself increasingly without Tommy around. While they spent their mornings together, both Abbess Helen and Sister Igrette thought it was a waste of Tommy’s talent for him to only train in internal mana techniques. Especially when he was so visibly not talented in it. So in the afternoons, he was taught external mana techniques, and his repertoire of spells had more than doubled since he reached the first layer, and they were much stronger too.