Chapter 48. A Bonfire Gets You a Burnt Village: A Lesson in Wasting Wood

Chapter 48: 48. A Bonfire Gets You a Burnt Village: A Lesson in Wasting Wood

She swung right away without any signal.

But thankfully, it was slow.

I want to be clear about that, because it was slower than anything I’d seen her do, a lazy horizontal sweep that moved through the air like a door swinging open.

I stepped back, felt the wind of it brush my chest, and thought, ’This is going to be easy.’

Then she swung again, and it wasn’t slow at all.

I got my sword up just in time, and the impact rang up my arm like I’d hit a bell with a hammer.

CLANNNGGGGGGGGG!

My blade went flying out of line, bounced off her sword with a clang, and swung wildly to the side, almost out of my hand.

I stumbled, and Sharon laughed.

"Your sword is lighter than your old one," she said. "And I can tell you’re still using the old strength."

"What...?"

"You’ve been fighting with that cracked, heavy junk piece of iron for weeks, and you got used to throwing your whole body behind every parry!"

"Now... you’ve got a blade that doesn’t need it, and you’re parrying like you’re swinging a log!"

"You’re putting twice the force into the block that it needs, and the blade is bouncing right back at you!"

I looked at my sword, and I felt my face go hot. It was so obviously true that I wanted to hide in the pond.

"Hold your grip like this," she said, and stepped in close and adjusted my fingers on the leather with a casual roughness that made me realize how calloused her hands were. "Looser... Wrists soft..."

"The blade should flow, not stop."

"I thought you hit things."

"I do! Hitting is the last step!"

"But first... you learn to be water." She snorted at herself. "Don’t tell Laura I said that."

"She’ll quote it for a year."

"I heard that!" Laura called from the bench.

"You were meant to!"

...

We went at it for what must have been an hour. She swung, I read it, and gradually the reading got easier.

Combat Instinct was running quietly in the back of my head, giving me a faint flicker of where the next strike would land, but I kept it as quiet as possible, like a candle behind a curtain.

I used my footwork instead.

I shifted my weight early, I slid out of arcs instead of fighting them, and I learned that a blade as light as this one could change direction mid-stroke without losing speed if I just let it.

At some point, my sword caught hers at the right angle, turned the blow aside instead of stopping it, and I felt it slide away along the flat of the blade without any force at all.

Sharon’s eyebrows went up.

"There," she said. "That’s it! Did you feel that?!"

"I... barely did anything."

"Exactly! And that’s the point!"

"Well, shit," I said, with real wonder. "I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time!"

"You’ve been doing it brutally! It worked because you have a lot of power and a lot of stubbornness!"

"But nuh-uh... that won’t last."

She stepped back and lowered her sword. Her face had turned serious, the way it did when she was about to say something she cared about.

"Now," she said. "Aether... How are you using it?"

"I just sort of push it out... Like pulling a lever."

"And it comes out all at once, in a big flash, right?"

"More or less, yeah."

"That’s wasteful." She tapped her sword against the ground. "Every time you do that, you pour out ten times more than you need to!"

’It’s like trying to light a candle with a bonfire... It works, but you waste all your wood!"

"I know that... I’ve been running out of gas constantly."

"Because you haven’t learned Aether Conservation." She held out her hand. "Come here."

"Give me your sword."

I handed it to her, and she held it level with one hand.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then I felt something... a faint pressure in the air, like the moment before a storm.

A thin shimmer ran along the edge of the blade, so faint it was almost invisible.

"That’s all," she said. "That’s all I’m putting in."

"It’s the smallest thread of Aether... running along the edge, and it makes the blade cut twice as deep as it normally would."

"A bonfire gets you a burnt village, but this... gets you a clean line."

She tossed the sword back to me. I caught it and tried to copy her, reaching for the warm current under my skin and trying to coax a single thread of it toward my hand.

The first attempt flooded the blade with light, and the second sent a burst of golden sparks out of the tip.

The third made the sword hum so loudly that Laura, who’d been sipping her tea, choked on it.

"Too much," Sharon said, patiently. "Again!"

On the fifth try, I felt it... It was a thin, quiet thread of power, like pulling a hair out of a bundle.

The edge of the sword glimmered once, so faintly that I’d have missed it if I hadn’t been looking, and when I swung at one of the wooden posts at the edge of the field, the blade went through it without a sound.

The top half slid off and thumped to the ground.

I stared at the clean cut.

"Fuck," I said, with feeling.

"Language," Sharon said, grinning. "But that’s about right."

I pulled up the panel with a flick of my eyes, mainly out of curiosity.

[ENERGY CONSUMPTION REPORT]

[Lust Used: 12%]

[Current Lust: 88%]

[Aether Efficiency: Improved]

[Note: Efficient use of power will extend combat endurance under future Lust Limit thresholds.]

I looked at the number and thought for a minute. I’d used twelve percent to learn all of that, over a full hour of work.

In the fight against Garrick, I’d burned through nearly everything I had in a single night.

If I could keep my costs down like this in real combat, I could last three or four times as long in the same fight.

And if I ever got to two hundred percent, I’d be a lot harder to put on the floor.

"You’ve got a face like a man who just found a hidden treasure," Sharon said.

"I think I did, yeah," I smiled.

"It’s not a treasure... It’s basic practice!"

"Every knight in this Order learns it in their first year." She shrugged. "You just got your powers late, so you missed the lessons!"

"I’m filling in the blanks."

"Thank you... Seriously."

"Don’t thank me yet. We haven’t started on your footwork."

I groaned, and from the bench, I heard Alicia say, "Your left foot is still turning out when you pivot!"

"I know," I said.

"And your shoulders drop right before you strike," Laura added.

"I know!"

"You don’t know," said Sharon. "You’ve got two of the best observers in the Order sitting thirty feet away, and you haven’t asked them for pointers."

"Even Alicia too?!"

"Yes! She’s good at observing."

I turned around. They both looked at me, and neither of them was smiling, although Alicia’s mouth was twitching.

"Okay," I said. "Help me."

"Gladly," said Alicia.

"Finally," said Laura.

It turned out to be the best training session I’d ever had. They took turns calling out corrections while Sharon kept swinging at me, and in between, they argued about what I was doing wrong.

Laura was exacting. She said my stance was inconsistent, my grip too tight, and my follow-through sloppy.

Alicia thought I was thinking too much and told me to trust my body and stop analyzing every step.

Sharon, who’d decided she wasn’t going to take sides, swung her sword and called them both idiots with great affection.

I caught Sharon watching them once, with her sword resting on her shoulder and a distinctly pleased look on her face.

It wasn’t romantic... It was the expression of a teacher who’d put two promising students in the same room and seen them start to help each other.

She looked proud, and she looked a little wistful too, and I filed that away without trying to read anything into it.

I glanced at the bench, and I saw Alicia watching Sharon at the same moment. She wasn’t watching the fight.

She was watching Sharon’s face, with a thoughtful tilt to her head, like a person keeping a very careful tally.

’Oh no,’ I thought. ’She’s doing it...!’

"Concentrate," Sharon said, and tapped my shin with the flat of her blade. "Your mind is wandering!"

"S-sorry."

"Don’t be sorry! Be better!"

"I’ll try," I said, but lowkey... I heard that somewhere.

"Don’t try. Do." She grinned. "That’s about all I’ve got for philosophy this morning."

And yes... I heard that from somewhere as well.