Chapter 311: The Difference Between Imitation and Reality

Iron and Abel switched to designing the residential module, which was supposed to be placed right in the middle of the giant structure.

The shape of the future "home" was already taking form: a massive ellipsoid stretched along the central axis, perfectly aligned with the geometry of the inertial rings. Inside, the space was planned as a multi-level mansion, with standard corridors, living rooms, and other technological features, but with one important detail: fold-out panoramic sections and open verandas.

While Abel worked on building a sturdy structural frame between the rings, Iron was busy fine-tuning the gravitational anchors for the floors of the future levels.

At that moment, the air beside them warped ever so slightly.

And Arsher suddenly materialized on a metal beam. Abel immediately pulled away from his work and shot him an irritated look. Iron, meanwhile, was so absorbed in adjusting the nodes with a plasma cutter that he didn't even notice the unfamiliar sound.

Abel sighed, setting his soldering iron aside.

"Again?"

Arsher silently nodded and tapped a finger against his wrist.

"Time's up."

Abel let out a tired breath and went back to work.

"Fine, take him."

Without waiting for an answer, Arsher reached out and pulled the plasma cutter right out of Iron's fingers. Still staring at the empty spot in front of him, not even noticing the tool was gone, Iron automatically moved on to the next task: mentally mapping out the cable channels beneath the floor, which required no physical tools at all.

Arsher shook his head and let out a heavy sigh.

"Hey... Earth to Iron... Earth..."

He paused for a second, grimaced, then added in a quieter voice:

"Shit, I'm already turning into Kai..."

With that, Arsher snapped his fingers.

The spatial jump lasted only a fraction of a second, and in the very next moment, Iron and Arsher materialized in a spacious forest clearing that Arsher had prepared beforehand.

Realizing where he was, Iron let out a heavy sigh and shot Arsher a hard look.

Arsher calmly held his gaze for a moment before speaking:

"Congratulations. You've gotten a lot better at controlling mana over these three days. Now it's time to put it into practice."

Iron raised an eyebrow, looking at him in disbelief.

"Wait, that's it? It's only been three days."

Arsher gave a faint smirk.

"Of course not. I can see perfectly well that you've been training at night. Keep going at this rate, and we won't even have to meditate."

Iron blinked for a few seconds, trying to process what he'd just heard. Then he asked, clearly confused:

"But I was in my village... What, have you been watching me this whole time?"

Arsher took a slow step toward Iron, closing the distance between them, and replied with a slight grin:

"I guess you could put it that way."

Standing right in front of Iron, Arsher calmly added:

"But still, you're human, so don't forget to rest."

Before the engineer could even react, Arsher instantly triggered a sharp spike in local air pressure, combined with the immediate elimination of kinetic friction beneath Iron's feet.

Iron was hurled backwards with tremendous force, flying across the entire clearing. At incredible speed, he shot through the air for hundreds of meters, crashing straight into thick tree trunks and snapping them one after another with loud cracks, until he finally crashed to the ground.

Iron lay among the broken tree trunks, coughing hoarsely and spitting blood onto the ground. Everything in front of his eyes was blurry, and a nasty ringing filled his ears. His vision was doubled. He blinked rapidly, trying to clear his vision.

Barely managing to prop himself up on his elbows, he tried to get up, but his body wouldn't respond. His muscles felt like they were made of lead, and his nervous system refused to transmit the signals.

Before he could even move, the air in front of him compressed. Arsher hadn't moved from his spot. He simply made a slight motion with his hand.

The gravitational pull suddenly intensified, and Iron, still lying on the ground, was dragged back toward Arsher at a furious speed.

At the last moment, feeling that monstrous pull, Iron canceled the external gravitational force. The ground beneath him creaked, and with a sharp, jerking movement, he shot backward, rolling sideways.

Getting up onto one knee, Iron clicked his tongue in irritation. A quick scan briefly caught Arsher's energy readout: his mana expenditure on magic barely reached one percent.

"Fuck, I just used up almost half my strength just to knock that vector off course... and he..."

Extending his hand forward, Iron filled the space around himself with a continuous field of electrical discharges. Hundreds of crackling arcs whistled through the air.

But Arsher merely let out a lazy sigh. A perfect dielectric barrier instantly formed around his body. The immensely powerful lightning bolts simply slid along its outer surface reflecting off it completely before dispersing into the grass, without causing Arsher the slightest harm.

Iron abruptly clenched his fist, materializing a sword in his hand, and teleported behind Arsher.

He kept tight control over his sword's teleportation, blocking any attempts at outside interference.

He had already raised the blade, bringing it dangerously close to Arsher's throat, when suddenly, the sword in his hand simply vanished.

Iron froze.

Arsher calmly looked at him and shook his head.

"No, no, no... We're fighting without swords."

At that very moment, a colossal gravitational overload crashed down on Iron. An invisible but crushing slab of air slammed his face straight into the ground, leaving him unable to move.

His breathing was ragged, and his ribs cracked painfully with every attempt to take a breath.

Focusing, Iron abruptly altered the very geometry of the space beneath him, using a reverse compression formula. The gravitational cocoon shattered like an eggshell.

In the same instant, the ground beneath him exploded in a shower of gravel and dirt. Iron broke free of the trap with a sudden burst of speed, launching himself backward before stopping ten meters away, his legs struggling to keep him upright.

Arsher gave a barely noticeable shrug, acknowledging the maneuver, and in the next instant, he took off.

The distance between them disappeared in a matter of milliseconds. Arsher appeared directly in front of him, throwing a straight punch accelerated to near-sonic speed. At the point of impact, the air instantly compressed into a dense plasma lens.

Iron couldn't physically dodge in time. Raising both hands in front of himself, he activated a localized entropy distortion and disintegration of the spatial matrix into elementary microparticles. A black, vibrating sphere of chaos appeared in front of him, and Arsher's punch struck it.

An energy of monstrous destructive power slammed into the anomaly, trying to tear through the defense. But Arsher simply spread his palm and literally pulled the concentrated chaos into himself, completely absorbing the destructive substance, as if draining it from within and reducing the entire attack to nothing.

Before Iron could even recoil in surprise, Arsher was already to his left, delivering a devastating kick straight to his torso.

There was no way to react to that kind of speed. On the verge of death, Iron thrust his hand forward and used a singularity-induced distortion of space-time, creating a microscopic black hole with a zero capture radius, capable of instantly tearing the very structure of an attacker's matter apart at the atomic level.

The space around Arsher instantly darkened. The singularity would have sucked in anything, reducing it to dust, but Arsher moved faster than the spell could fully form. With his ability to foresee trajectories and instantly calculate every possible vector through quantum analysis, he made a perfectly precise step into the distortion's blind spot, slipping through the deadly anomaly a split second before it activated.

The black point collapsed in empty space, leaving him completely unharmed.

The ground beneath them trembled under the lingering shockwaves. Once again, the two stood motionless, facing each other.

With difficulty, Iron forced out what little air he had left and abruptly collapsed the space around himself. In the next second, he materialized deep in the thick of the forest.

Without wasting a second catching his breath, he threw up his hands and unleashed a barrage of physical spells at the spot where Arsher had been. Sudden shifts in ballistic pressure, sharp acceleration vectors, and pinpoint kinetic strikes erupted from his fingertips in a devastating wave, tearing the clearing apart.

Arsher shifted by mere fractions of a millimeter, positioning himself in the exact spots where the physical vectors canceled each other out. Every one of Iron's spells dispersed harmlessly, rendered useless by Arsher's perfect understanding of inertia.

The next second, the air behind Iron stirred ever so slightly.

Arsher materialized right behind his right shoulder. His open palm, accelerated to an unimaginable speed and surrounded by high-frequency vibrations, became a deadly, blindingly white blade.

At the very last possible moment, Iron performed a sharp micro-teleport to the side.

Arsher's palm sliced through the air. A deep, clean sound rang out as space itself was cut apart where Iron had been standing just moments ago. A massive tree trunk caught in the path of the strike, along with the ground behind it, was cleaved with an absolutely perfect, mirror-smooth cut. The slash extended several meters deep into the soil, making the ground tremble slightly.

Iron dropped to his knees among the broken branches, gasping for air in heavy, ragged breaths. His body was burning with pain, and his muscles refused to obey after the repeated strain. Every breath sent a burning sensation spreading through his chest. He could no longer keep himself upright and fell heavily onto his back, right beside the broken trees.

Arsher silently stepped forward and stopped beside him. Glancing down at the exhausted Iron, he said thoughtfully:

"Man... you're using mana to do magic..."

Iron was breathing heavily and unevenly. He didn't even have the strength to open his mouth and respond, but his expression made it clear he'd heard him. Arsher understood perfectly well what he wanted to ask, so he calmly continued:

"It's just that manipulating the laws of physics is much easier, and much more powerful, if you work with them directly."

With that, Arsher lazily waved his hand toward the wrecked forest. The air around them trembled ever so slightly, and the broken tree trunks began returning to their original positions, slowly growing back together with the dull creaking of wood.

Arsher stepped closer and continued:

"The fact that you use mana for your magic is just an imitation. Your spells imitate physics, but they aren't physics themselves. You need to start using physics itself directly in combat, without using a single drop of your mana."

Meanwhile, the trees around them had completely grown back together.

Iron was still lying on his back, staring with an unfocused gaze at a gap between the leaves.

Arsher spoke again, crouching down beside him:

"And to use the laws of physics directly, you need two things. First: you need such perfect control over your body and your own energy that, eventually, you might literally not even need mana anymore... And second, you need to understand physics itself inside and out, learning to interact with it directly without your brain melting in the process."

Arsher let out a heavy sigh. The space around them suddenly warped, collapsing into a single tight point.

In the next second, Iron materialized right on a soft couch.

Arsher, meanwhile, was approaching him with a glass of water. As he walked over, he casually remarked:

"Still, the first option will be a lot easier for you."

Reaching the couch, Arsher sat down beside him and held out the glass. Still not fully recovered from the brutal training session, Iron silently rolled onto his side on the couch, letting out a heavy breath.

Noticing his condition, Arsher switched the glass to his other hand and carefully placed it on the armrest.

Iron rasped through clenched teeth, his voice exhausted:

"Everyone keeps beating me up... Am I really that pathetic... Fucking hell..."

Several minutes of complete silence passed.

Lumon began an accelerated biological reconstruction, actively regenerating damaged tissue, burning off excess proteins, and repairing torn muscles.

Gradually coming back to his senses, Iron struggled to lift himself onto one elbow, wincing at the lingering pain.

Arsher looked at him and calmly asked:

"Want some water?"

Iron silently nodded. Arsher picked up the glass from the armrest and handed it to him. After taking a couple of sips, Iron leaned back against the couch, let out a heavy breath, and finally asked the question that had been bothering him:

"Why do you even need me? You already have yourself... You can control physics too. Why does the Council need someone who does exactly the same thing, only several times weaker? And why are you even teaching me?"

Iron gave Arsher an assessing look.

"Yeah, I get that you’ve told me this a hundred times already... but it’s obviously nonsense."

Arsher looked away for a moment, hesitating, but eventually answered:

"Yeah, I'm only teaching you because you're something more than just a player who controls physics. I noticed that with your magic, specifically Ssengnihton, the one you told me about, you were controlling not only physics itself, but geometry and mathematics at the same time. That's what makes you much more versatile. After all... I am physics itself, so I can't go against its rules. But you've already proven more than once that you can. And Ssengnihton is a perfect example of that."

Iron listened carefully, slowly processing what he'd just heard.

He silently finished the rest of his water, got up from the couch in one swift motion, and confidently said:

"Alright, then. Let's go train."

Arsher gave a faint smile.

"Yeah, that's the spirit. Let's go."

The space around them collapsed once again. At the same moment, the glass materialized directly inside the sink.

For another second, Iron's final words lingered as an echo in the empty room:

"Anyway... I've learned enough for today."