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1119 Words
Susanne was familiar with the lecture, having received a full course on Concept usage between the tournament and Minkalla, and was the most skilled of the four of them by far. However, that just meant Carol had her practicing without using her sword, and that was proving to be an incredible obstacle for the swordswoman, unable to warp space by so much as an inch.
Aster struggled with the entire idea of shrinking space, as she was so used to using her ice and icy thoughts to lock down space that it took her almost an hour to even get her Concept to grip space.
Oddly enough, once she did get that initial grasp over space, she had the first actual use of her Concept to shorten space.
Sort of.
Aster called it ice skating and was able to speed herself up by believing the world was slippery like wet ice, but she wasn’t able to do anything more than accelerate.
Liz, on the other hand, was on step zero, and was working with Luna to try and figure out how to fly with just her Concept.
With the mental image that the world itself was shifting around her, she was able to almost hover for a few moments, but she struggled to take it beyond that.
Carol praised her efforts, but Luna only huffed that it was to be expected, which made Matt smile.
That was Luna.
Even when she first introduced herself and was teaching them how to control skills after casting without manipulation spells, she expected nothing but the best from them, which meant they only ever really got praised for their efforts rather than results.
At first, Matt thought that was mean of her, but with hindsight and age, he appreciated that she didn’t really care how good they were at any specific thing, so long as they were actively improving themselves.
Closing his eyes and meditating, Matt tried to feel the space around him like he did air.
When he learned to zipper the air around him, he first needed to be slowed down from moving too quickly by the air resistance. Once he had a good feeling of that resistance, it had been fairly easy to learn to stop that same feeling.
The visual of parting the air in front of him while mending it behind had come from his early attempts, where he created gale force winds in his wake by not controlling the turbulence his passage generated.
At first, having to close the air back up to a still form had made his work dozens of times more difficult, but as he got used to it, even that had become second nature.
He felt like this just needed something similar.
With his eyes still closed, he waved his hand through the space in front of him, relying on his proprioception to feel his hand moving through the distance in front of him.
It moved in a steady arc, not skipping any of the intervening distance.
After a few more failed attempts, he opened his eyes to see amethyst-like purple eyes staring at him with their noses almost touching.
Jerking back, Matt yelped as Carol laughed and pulled away.
“I was wondering how long you would sit there for.”
Matt scrambled to his feet and looked around, seeing the sun was almost set and everyone else was gone.
Carol explained, “Everyone else went inside an hour or so ago. Started to get headaches, and we don’t want you guys pushing too hard, but your little nap wasn’t hurting yourself, so we left you to it.”
Matt brushed himself off and ignored Carol’s comment about taking a nap to ask her a question of his own.
“How do you feel space? When I started zippering the air, it was because the air was slowing me down. Resisting that seemed natural, easy…a normal extension of my powers.”
Carol nodded and slung an arm around Matt’s shoulder.
He thought she was being friendly but soon realized she was trying to give him an example as she guided him around the small lawn. Her arm was like a vice he couldn’t escape from, while her spirit was like a blanket smothering him and making it hard to breathe.
He could still walk, in fact he had to walk as Carol guided him, but like a man desperate for air, her guiding wasn’t what he needed. He needed to break free and threw his Concept at her and her own Domain.
He felt like a single ant trying to move a tree, but as she backed her Domain off him, he felt like he might have understood something.
As she let him stumble free, he spun on his prosthetic leg to balance himself.
After taking a deep breath, he thanked her. “I think that helped. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I felt something there.”
Carol laughed. “When you manage it, you can buy me a drink. Until then, don’t get your hopes up. I’ll reiterate the speech I gave the others when they finished up. We are teaching you this not because you are ready to learn it, but because your bodies are still healing, and there’s no reason to let you stay too idle. This is good to learn, but no one expects you to learn it today, or even this decade. If you figure it out before you get off The Path, I’ll be surprised. Also note it’s something that becoming higher-tier won’t help you with, not these initial steps at least.”
Matt nodded and went inside to join the other three for dinner and a conversation about what they learned today but couldn’t help shake the feeling that he really had felt something.
A week later, when he was getting his prosthetic leg removed and his own regrown, he felt like he understood the sensation, and when the surgery was over, he rushed over to Carol and Luna so he could try his process out.
It took him a few attempts to fall into the mindset he had had in the hospital, but when he did, he waved his hand in front of himself, felt his conception with his Domain, and pushed.
Except instead of speeding up as his Concept shortened the space around his hand, it slowed down and seemed to travel more distance than was actually there.
Luna rubbed her face with her paw while Carol outright laughed and said, “Well, now you just need to learn how to do the opposite of that. I was almost ready to call you a genius. Glad you proved me wrong.”
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