Chapter 83: The Weapon Beneath the Healing

Chapter 83: Chapter 83: The Weapon Beneath the Healing

Previous day,

Felix walked into one of the Association’s high-level training gyms. An instructor stood near the wall with a digital tablet, assigned to check Felix’s energy core now that his breakthrough had settled.

Even when an Awakened person felt fine, their mana could act jumpy for weeks, so this checkup was standard rule.

"Ready?" Felix asked, rolling his shoulders.

"Start whenever you like," the instructor answered.

Felix shut his eyes. He let the energy move through his veins: clean, smooth, with zero wasted motion. Bright green mana gathered tight around both hands, humming with a sharp, electric buzz as it shaped into solid, razor-sharp blades.

"Let’s go."

SWOOSH.

Felix blurred forward so fast the instructor’s eyes could barely track him.

BANG!

His fist smashed into the heavy practice dummy, sending a metallic shriek through the room as the steel frame rattled violently.

THUD!

A heavy roundhouse kick landed right after, followed instantly by a second strike.

CRACK!

Each blow blended seamlessly into the next.

THUMP!

An elbow slammed home.

BAM!

A rising knee caved the dummy’s armor in.

WHAM!

An open palm thrust rattled the core bolts.

SHING!

A green mana blade slashed clean across the target plate, throwing off a bright shower of sparks.

Step, dodge, counter.

WHOOSH, SMACK!

"Your physical output is absurd," the instructor muttered, watching the power graph spike and beep frantically on his screen.

Felix ignored the praise and kept moving. He threw mana blades, flicked compressed needles, layered a protective coat of mana over his skin, and fired long-range energy darts.

At the same time, he tested his new multi-tasking: healing himself while running, healing while swinging a punch, and keeping four separate magic effects active at once.

Then came the real test: live combat endurance.

The training room hummed to life, creating a hard-light dummy, S-rank opponent. Felix stepped right up to it, read its moves, adapted, and pushed back, his energy sitting completely under his thumb the entire round.

"How are you keeping it that steady?" the instructor asked, shocked.

Felix didn’t reply, he was too busy fighting.

The computer bumped the puppet up to peak S-rank. Felix met it head-on. His mana blade smacked against the hologram’s spear.

CLANG

He slid inside its reach and finished the bot with a hard strike to the chest plate.

The system chimed again, preparing to generate an SS-rank target.

"Alright, that’s enough," the instructor said quickly, reaching for the console.

"One more round," Felix urged.

"Felix, SS-rank dummies are dangerous—"

"Just one."

The instructor sighed. "Fine."

The new fight was visibly brutal. The jump between top S-rank and bottom SS-rank was massive.

The dummy hit like an avalanche, but Felix didn’t fold. His energy moved instantly to wherever he needed it. Shields formed a split second before impacts landed, his counterattacks concentrated into tiny, piercing points, and his automated healing closed gashes almost as fast as they appeared.

He wasn’t overpowering the machine with brute strength. He was outplaying it with skill.

A few minutes later, Felix shut down the simulation. The room went silent, the heavy hum fading away. Felix let out a slow breath and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.

"Well?"

The instructor slowly lowered the tablet, staring at the screen. "You can stand toe-to-toe with a low-tier SS-rank."

The instructor checked the logs again.

Yet the raw numbers on the screen didn’t tell the real story. Felix’s power was massive, but his fine control was what truly broke the rules.

The instructor pulled up another file to compare notes. "There’s still something I don’t understand."

"What’s that?" Felix asked, grabbing a towel.

"Your proficiency level. Ultra III."

The instructor pulled up Aria’s file. She was an S-rank with Ice magic, also at Ultra III. Her core sat right in the middle of S-rank, yet she regularly fought like a peak S-rank.

Her proficiency explained why: Ultra III meant her Ice was so refined that she got three times more value out of every drop of energy than an ordinary mage could.

Next, he pulled up Darius. S-rank, Earth magic, High I proficiency. Darius could easily beat low-tier S-ranks and hold his ground against mid-tier foes, but against a peak S-rank, his lack of refinement started to show.

"That’s my question," the instructor said, looking back up at Felix. "Your healing is Ultra III, sure. But healing shouldn’t make you punch this hard."

"You’re mixing up proficiency with pure control," Felix said. "They aren’t the same thing."

"Aren’t they?"

Felix held up his right hand. A thin, glowing thread of green mana danced along his index finger. "This is proficiency. It shows how polished your element is, and how well you can use your specific affinity." He closed his fist, and the green light vanished. "Control is something else entirely."

Felix opened his hand again. This time, the mana rising from his skin had no green glow, no soothing warmth, and zero healing properties. It was just dense, raw, colorless force.

The instructor’s eyes popped open.

Felix casually flicked his finger. The tiny pellet of raw energy shot across the gym and blew a clean hole straight through the reinforced back wall.

"Wait... that’s—"

"Pure mana," Felix said. "Stripped clean of the healing trait."

The instructor looked baffled. "How?"

Felix’s playful grin faded a bit. "Most people think their mana is their element. For Aria, her mana is Ice." A tiny sphere of green mist flickered above Felix’s palm to demonstrate.

"For Darius, his mana is Earth." A small bit of green gravel rolled over his knuckles, then crumbled away. "They polish that element: making it sharper, colder, or harder but it never stops being what it was born as."

Felix dropped his hand. "I couldn’t survive fighting like that. My element is healing. If I punched an enemy with regular healing mana, I’d just patch up their bruises. If I swung a healing blade at a monster, I’d be doing it a favor."

The instructor gave a dry chuckle. "Yeah, that would be a terrible weapon."

"Exactly," Felix said, looking down at his knuckles. "So when I was a kid, I realized something. If I wanted to survive on the front lines, I had to separate the energy itself from the healing job it was born to do."

"Awakened scholars say that’s literally impossible."

"It is impossible for most people," Felix said with a small shrug. "That’s why I had to force myself to do it."

He had never accepted the idea that being a healer meant standing in the back like a helpless target.

He refused to let his support tag be a limit on what he could do. So he drilled day after day, year after year, learning how to pack mana tight, shape it into blades, coat his skin like armor, and fire it like bullets.

Most importantly, he learned how to switch off the healing effect whenever he wanted to hit something.

Aria could sharpen her Ice until it cut steel. Darius could make his stone armor hard as diamond.

But neither of them could peel their element away to use blank, raw force. Nobody had ever learned how to do that.

Except Felix.

"I spent my entire youth treating mana like a weapon first," Felix explained. "Healing came second. If I wanted to stand beside real fighters, I had no other choice."

That was the real secret behind why he could fight above his weight class for years. Even when his core was stuck at A-rank, he held his own next to S-ranks, not because his core was bigger, and not because healing magic was secretly deadly. It was his ridiculous control.

He had turned the energy itself into an adaptable weapon.

And now he was an S-rank.

He had a much bigger core, way more energy, a body built like iron, and automatic regeneration. But the crazy control underneath hadn’t changed at all. He just had ten times more fuel to burn.

The instructor looked from the hole in the wall back to Felix. "You know how terrifying that makes you, right?"

"I’ve been told," Felix said dryly.

"You were already beating S-ranks when you were just an A-rank."

"And now you’re an S-rank yourself."

Felix looked over at the cracked target dummy.

"And I can handle low-tier SS-ranks."

"You’re a total freak of nature."

Felix chuckled.

He tossed his towel onto the bench and turned toward the locker room doors, then paused halfway across the gym floor as a new thought crossed his mind.

If this was what he could pull off right after his breakthrough, what would happen once his proficiency climbed higher? What would happen once his muscles fully adapted to the S-rank core? What would he look like once he created new techniques around this massive pool of power?

His smirk grew wider.

There were terrifying monsters and dangerous people out there in the world. Far stronger than anything he had faced yet.

He was excited to find it.

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