Chapter 352: Training With a King and a Bear

The tier 3 deer was peacefully grazing on the lush grasses growing in the quiet clearing, the sun was shining down on it from above as the wind gently blew past.

Then, suddenly and without warning the deer exploded into a cloud of gore as a bedraggled dragon girl was flung into the clearing.

A moment later that same dragon girl impacted with the tree on the edge of the clearing, only she did not stop upon impacting it, instead her body exploded the trunk of the tree and she shot right through that as well.

She only came to a stop a good 100 meters further away after smashing through two separate trees and eventually forming a large crater in the ground.

Violet let out a wheezing cough as she stared blankly up at the sky above, she briefly wondered why the sky was spinning before her mind snapped back into gear and her tier 5 consitution healed that ’minor’ concussion.

She blinked out of the crater, a dozen void spears forming around her as she desperately tried to expand her domain once again.

Yet a spike of pain shot through her mind and her domain hardly expanded a hands breath from her body.

She grimaced and looked up in time to see a brown blur flying towards her at terrifying speeds.

Violet launched all of her spears at the incoming target, headless of any kind of restraint. Yet she watched in frustrated annoyance as the figure seemingly effortlessly parried each spear away.

Even when Violet tried to explode the spears upon contact, the domain wrapped around the woman charging at her prevented Violet from interacting with them.

Only once the spears left the bears domain did they explode, yet that shockwave only helped fire the bear shaped missile faster towards Violet.

She hastily leapt backwards as a dozen shield constructs formed infront of the bear woman. Then runes began to carve themselves into reality all around her.

Yet those shields didn’t even slow down the woman as she charged straight at Violet. She also watched in annoyance as a lance of the woman’s domain shot out and pierced straight through the still forming runes causing them to shatter and send a painful backlash into Violet’s mind.

Then the fist of the bear woman struck the side of Violet’s head and she formed a fresh crater in the ground below her with a booming thud.

This time, Violet did not get back up right away.

She lay there in a complete daze, unable to even form coherent thoughts as the world spun around her and blood dripped down her head.

After several moments, or minutes, or hours really, Violet had no concept of time currently. A hand reached down and grasped Violet’s shoulder, she was then pulled upright and set on her unsteady feet.

She was then patted down, some of the dirt and debris being shaken loose.

Violet then looked up into the face of her tormentor with a scowl.

Her tormentor was naturally Karla, the bearkin general of Syan who had promised to train Violet in the run up until the next stage of the Champion Beast Protocol.

Only Karla did not believe in normal teaching methods, no she was a strong believer in as she would call it, ’hands on teaching’. Or as Violet would call it, beating the information into her students with excessive force.

It had only been a couple of days since the training started and already Violet had been knocked out at least 6 separate times, broken twice that many bones and bled her body weight in blood.

The only reason she was even still alive was because of Karla’s domain.

As Violet stood there in a daze a wave of soothing regeneration enveloped her tired and battered body. Karla’s domain was near entirely focused on regeneration.

Be that the healing of herself or allies, or the ’regeneration’ of nature around her, causing it to rapidly grow to do her bidding.

She held the nature specialisation and had taken it in a unique way. Yet she seemed to prefer hand to hand combat, only really utilising her afinity to occasionally control plant life to create an opening to punch, kick, headbutt, tackle or any other number of physical attacks to land.

She was a master brawler and seemed determined to beat ’propper’ technique into Violet.

Because apparently Violet fought like a wild beast. Personally Violet didn’t see any issue with that given that she was by definition a Wild Beast.

Pointing that out to Karla resulted in the first of her many broken bones.

Then Karla simply gave Violet a single objective, don’t get hit.

Then she spent the entire first day ruthlessly chasing down and beating Violet up. Whenever she became unable to continue fighting Karla would heal her up and then proceed to give feedback on how she did for 5 minutes, then she would restart the entire thing over again.

She had done that to Violet for an entire day, 24 hours straight with only the regular 5 minute breaks to change things up.

Speaking of feedback. "You still don’t move your body enough, you keep standing still, or when you do move it is to reach a singular point before locking in place again and shooting off spells. You need to learn to be continually moving as you use your magic." Karla explained.

"Your runes, you need to learn to either form them faster, hide their creation or reinforce them with your own domain so that people like me don’t break them with a simple domain spike."

Violet grimaced at her words, yet knew that Karla spoke the truth. She was fairly static in battle when trying to rely on magic. It was only when forced to reposition or directly avoid an attack did she truly move, even then she preferred to teleport with her blink skill.

Yet Karla was not done yet. "Your shields can be combined into a singular whole, that would be more powerful than several weaker individual shields, why not combine them properly?"

Karla then went on the pick apart every aspect of their latest battle, from the speed of her recovery to the number of spears and bolts she formed and to the position in which she shot them.

Any and ever slight mistake was brutally pointed out and brought to Violet’s attention, no aspect of her combat style was left untouched.

Then when she had finished her latest verbal beatdown she paused for a moment then spoke once again. "That’s enough rest, back to it." Then she punched forwards with Violet desperately blinking away as the fight resumed.

In another part of the forest, King Mason was floating mid air across from Luna who was also floating mid air.

The world around them had turned into an icy hellscape. Trees were covered in thick ice, the ground was entirely frozen, even the air seemed to be frozen in place with not even a stray breeze passing through.

Yet the ice was not static.

Around Luna fortifications of ice were being constantly formed, only for the walls to shatter as a cold more extreme than any Luna had ever imagined shattered her own ice like brittle glass.

When her domain tried to push forwards it was welcomed in to the foreign domain of the king only for the opening to close up and shatter that part of Luna’s will that had extended too deep.

Then with Luna’s attack failed the King would launch his own domain offensive.

The King had extended his domain to entirely encompass Luna and her own, it then crept in from all angles, his cold overwhelming and pushing back Luna’s comparatively fragile domain from all angles.

Luna was forced to pull back whilst continually reinforcing every point of her domain that was being challenged.

It was a constant back and forth, the King continually testing and pushing Luna to improve her control over her domain.

Only as opposed to Karla’s training method of beating up her student. He preferred a more comprehensive breakdown of his students.

He pointed out each flaw in her strategy with pinpoint precise domain control, teaching her how to improve by showing her the exact point she was weak in, then performing what she intended to do better than she could ever hope of doing any time soon.

It helped that the King held a related domain to Luna, with that he was able to impart several useful insights to her.

They would battle like this until Luna was entirely unable to maintain her domain any longer. The duration she could continue to keep it active was steadily increasing, yet her limit was still relatively short when contending against another much more powerful domain.

Once she was mentally exhausted, the king would then turn to combat. They would have a series of spars, the king was extremely skilled with the spear.

He would fight against her with pure weapon mastery, not using any skills as she threw everything that she had at him. He would systematically break down her every trick, continually instructing her on what she did both right and wrong.

Then once she had recovered enough mentally they would swap right back to domain practice.