Chapter 65. Training With Amber

Chapter 65: 65. Training With Amber

Kael followed Amber deeper into the guild, leaving the main hall and Mira’s lingering embrace behind.

The corridor they took slanted slightly downward before opening into a wider internal passage that ran along the rear of the building.

To the left a broad staircase climbed toward the second floor, where rows of private rooms waited for rankers who needed to stay the night.

Those rooms were simple but solid, reserved for anyone who paid the nightly fee or held a high enough clearance.

Straight ahead, through a set of reinforced double doors, lay the guild’s large common arena.

The space was already filling with the lower-ranked fighters who had been ordered to keep practicing on the remaining dummies.

The sound of impacts and strained breathing drifted faintly through the walls.

Amber ignored both the stairs and the common arena.

She turned right instead, leading him down a narrower, quieter hallway marked with a single silver rune above the entrance.

This section was restricted.

Only high-rankers and those with enough coin or connections were allowed past the barrier.

The air here felt cleaner, the mana density slightly higher, as if the guild had deliberately reinforced the walls to contain stronger techniques.

At the far end of the restricted corridor a heavy wooden door stood half-open.

Beyond it Kael caught a glimpse of polished stone floors and training equipment far better than anything in the public arena.

A side passage further along led toward the guild’s private onsen, the baths carefully divided into male and female sides so rankers could recover after hard sessions without mixing.

Amber pushed the training-room door fully open and stepped inside without looking back. Kael followed.

His eyes dropped almost on their own.

The short blood-red gown-style dress she wore clung tightly to her hips.

Each step made the firm, perky curve of her ass rise and fall in a steady, hypnotic rhythm.

The fabric shifted just enough to outline the shape beneath, the motion natural and unselfconscious.

Dark stockings covered her legs down to red shoes that clicked once against the stone.

Her waist narrowed sharply above the dress, then flared again into the subtle lines of her torso.

Even without trying, the proportions of her body carried a clear, quiet seduction.

The deep-red curls of her hair caught the daylight that spilled through a high window, the color vivid against the darker tones of the private room.

Kael kept his expression even and his pace steady, but the view held his attention longer than it should have.

The restricted hallway had been quiet. The private training room was quieter still. Amber finally stopped in the center of the open floor and turned to face him.

The room itself was larger than it had looked from the corridor.

Five oversized mana stones sat in the corners and against the far wall, each one glowing with a steady internal light.

The air inside felt thick with concentrated mana, dense enough that even breathing seemed to pull power into the body.

Training in a space like this would force faster progress than any normal practice yard. ℴ

Building something this expensive in a border town like Grayhollow said a great deal about how deep Mira’s husband’s pockets ran.

Amber’s voice came out low and edged with clear threat.

"You’ll stay in this room with me for the next three days. We’re going to practice until your body stops making excuses. Now get over here."

Kael stepped fully inside and let the door close behind him. He glanced once more at the glowing stones, then back at the red-haired woman standing in the center of the floor.

"So how am I supposed to practice fighting in here? Am I going to fight you? You’re probably B-rank or higher. I won’t even be able to touch you."

Amber’s mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile.

"Don’t worry. I won’t use any real skills. I’ll only put out spare mana. You attack me with everything you’ve got. That’s the deal."

Kael stopped a few paces away from her and settled into a ready stance.

The Mulberry sword rested loosely in his right hand.

Amber stood relaxed, weight balanced, black eyes watching him without the slightest tension.

"Come on then," she said. "Use your full power, don’t hold back."

Kael did not waste time testing the distance.

He pulled mana from his core the same way he had against the dummy, forcing it into a single dense point at the tip of the blade.

The air around the point shimmered with a faint pinkish-black haze.

He stepped in hard and swung in a clean, rising cut aimed at her left shoulder.

The sword never reached her.

Amber shifted half a step to the side.

Her left hand rose, fingers coated in a thin layer of deep red mana that flickered like banked fire.

The two energies met with a sharp, dry crack.

Crack—!

Blue-tinged force from Kael’s condensed node slammed against the red layer and failed to push through.

The impact ran straight up his arm.

He was forced back two full steps, boots scraping across the polished stone.

While the red mana still lingered on her hand, Kael’s eyes stayed on the color and the way it moved.

In this world almost every ranker received an affinity through the blessing of one of the major goddesses.

Seraphine’s blood magic was the classic signature of her vampire bloodline.

Tina’s nature-based spells came from the elf side of her heritage.

Brianna’s raw physical power matched the orc structure she carried.

Affinity was not something a person chose.

It settled into the body early and shaped the way mana expressed itself for the rest of a ranker’s life.

Looking at the deep red coating Amber’s fingers, Kael wondered if hers was a fire-type affinity.

The color, the heat it carried, and even her sharp personality all lined up with that possibility.

He recovered at once and came in again, this time with a basic sequence of cuts with high diagonal, horizontal follow-up, low thrust.

Amber’s hand moved only as much as necessary.

Each strike met the same thin red coating.

Clack. Clack. Clang.

"Your sword basics are solid," she said, voice still rough and even while she turned another cut aside.

"The problem is how you handle that little bit of mana you’ve got. You’re dumping it all in one place instead of spreading and adjusting it. Maximize what you actually have instead of trying to force something bigger."

Kael circled left and tried a different angle, then another.

Every attempt ended the same way.

The red layer never thickened, never flared into a real skill, yet it stopped everything he threw at it.

Sweat had already started to form along his collarbone from the dense mana in the room and the constant effort.

He decided to change the approach.

While his body kept moving he triggered the Pheromone Skill.

A thin pink mist spread outward from his skin, visible only to him.

It drifted toward Amber in a soft cloud and washed across her without resistance.

From Kael’s point of view nothing happened. Her expression did not change. Her breathing did not shift.

The red mana coating her hand stayed steady as she blocked the next strike.

What he could not see was the sudden, sharp itch that bloomed between Amber’s thighs the moment the mist touched her.

The sensation was unfamiliar and unwanted.

A thin line of wetness formed against the inner fabric of her blood-red gown-style dress, darkening the material just enough that anyone looking carefully at the middle of her legs would have noticed.

She kept her stance perfect and her face blank, refusing to acknowledge the feeling even to herself.

Kael’s jaw tightened.

’How strong is she that even this does nothing?’

He reset his stance, pulled more mana into the Mulberry sword, and went in again, determined to find even one opening before the first day of training ended.

The blade met the red layer once more with the same dry crack of clashing energy.

Amber turned the strike aside with almost lazy precision and stepped back half a pace, giving him room to reset.

Inside her thoughts a different frustration was building.

The itch between her legs refused to fade. It sat there like a low, persistent demand she had never felt before.

She knew, in theory, what people did when that kind of heat appeared.

She had heard other rankers talk about it in the academy dorms.

She had never once tried it herself. Fighting had always been enough. Strength had always been enough.

The idea of touching herself for any reason other than cleaning a wound or adjusting gear had never interested her.

Now the urge to press her fingers against that place and rub until the sensation stopped was strong enough to make her fingers twitch once against her thigh.

She forced the hand still.

She would not do it in front of him. She would not do it at all if she could help it.

Three days of training remained, and she intended to spend every hour of them turning this blond ranker into something that could actually survive a real fight.

Anything else was a distraction she refused to allow.

The heat started to grow slowly in her inner garden despite her controlling thoughts.