Dante’s Immortality – Chapter 19

After the healer removed the shards of wood from his body, Archie began to actually teach him to manipulate the world essence into the sword and control it, and the process had nothing to do with actually using the sword itself. Which really pissed him off…

Archie pulled out two glass-like orbs and tossed them to both him and Will. Dante caught his, it was completely clear and slightly larger than the palm of his hand. “This is a manipulation orb. I would suggest you don’t lose it, it’s the only one you’ll get for free.” He pulled another one out of his pocket. “With one of these, you can train in both World Essence Manipulation and Mana Manipulation without something blowing up.” Archie finished the last with a laugh. “There are a few other uses for these, but those uses are just for pretentious upstarts, and have no place in a real combatant’s training.”

“The orb will automatically stabilize and diffuse world essence and Mana. The first step is to actually fill it with world essence.” Archie narrowed his eyebrows as he focused on the orb. Where his hands were holding it, mist-like world essence began to pour into the clear ball. The essence itself was thin and could easily be seen through.

“After you fill it with any amount of world essence, compress it.” The mist began to compress down into the center. It turned into a small, dense blue ball within the manipulation orb. “When condensed, the world essence will stop leaking out of the manipulation orb. When you get to this stage, and can hold it comfortably, you will be able to fill a wooden sword without it exploding.” He stopped the demonstration by releasing his hold on the condensed world essence. It immediately expanded out into blue mist and escaped as it reached the outside of the orb.

“You have a month to be able to condense world essence in the orb. Any amount will do.” He looked at the two of them, making sure they understood. They both nodded.

He actually understood quite well. He understood that Archie had set him up to fail earlier, and the shards of wood that had been lodged within his body were clearly for the instructor’s enjoyment. He also understood that Will knew what would happen, he had backed off immediately when he tried to fill the sword with world essence.

Dante let out a deep breath. It didn’t matter, he had been treated like this before. From past experience, he knew that if he complained or tried to retaliate it would only get worse. He had been too trusting of Archie and almost blew himself up. Since he had left Alazel he had dropped his guard far too often, a mistake he wouldn’t make again.

“Alright, now that we’ve covered the basics world essence manipulation it’s time to break the two of you in.” Archie reached back into the pile of swords and picked out two new weapons. He tossed Dante one and kept the other for himself. Will still had the sword he had been given earlier. Archie pointed his weapon at the two of them. “Alright, two against one. We will fight until all of the swords are broken.”

Fight until the swords are broken?

The words didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Twenty wooden swords had been understandable when he had thought they were going to lose one every time they failed with world essence manipulation, but if they were just going to be fighting, he didn’t understand how they would break so many solid word swords.

He quickly received his answer as Archie ran at them. Dante let a breath of relief out as the instructor charged Will first. The noble looked like he had at least some experience in sword fighting, as Archie swung at him he readied his wooden sword to deflect the blow. Archie, mid-swing, switched his grip on the weapon bringing it down flat on Will’s hand to an audible snapping noise. Will immediately let go of the sword, hunching over his hand in pain. Will clearly thought the fight was over after he broke his fingers, but was wrong. Archie swung the flat of his sword against Will’s ribs. The snapping noise was far louder this time, and the wooden sword broke in half.

Dante watched in horror, hoping his Constitution was higher than Will’s. There was no way that he hadn’t just broken a few ribs. Archie threw down his now broken sword. “That’s one sword down.” He walked over to the pile and picked another one up, then turned to Dante.

Shit.

As quickly as he could, Dante held his sword out between his hands and kneed it as hard as he could in an attempt to break it. His only result was pain in his knee.

Seeing what he was doing Archie laughed. “Good to see you have a brain on you.” The instructor charged him, and Dante knew he had no chance.

At half his maximum speed, he brought his sword up to deflect Archie’s first strike. The instructor used the same tactic he used against Will, changing his grip mid-swing and attacking his hand.

He was ready for the tactic, as soon as Archie switched grips and brought his sword down toward his hand, he utilized his full Dexterity and Agility, dodging the instructors attack completely and slashing at his neck.

He had no idea what happened next, one moment he was swinging at Archie’s neck, the next moment he heard a loud crack and he fell to the floor clutching his now broken ribs. He touched them lightly, checking to see how many were broken. Two of them, and three were cracked, thankfully none of them seemed to puncture a lung. He had broken his fair share of ribs in Alazel and immediately tried to get himself upright, laying down would only make things worse.

As Dante tried to sit up, another cracking noise rang out, causing him to violently flinch. Luckily it wasn’t him, Will got hit again.

Archie walked back to the pile of swords, picking up a new one, then turned back and saw Dante struggling to sit up. “Not bad, you have more backbone than the usual pansies I get.” He swaggered over to Dante with a smile on his face and a new sword in hand.

Will was already knocked out, and he could hardly move at all with his broken ribs. Dante just sat back down on the ground, waiting for the next blow. There was no way he could get away from the instructor.

Closing his eyes, not wanting to see the blow coming, Dante heard another cracking noise. This time his shoulder felt crushed, and he was flung through the dirt like a ragdoll.

A few seconds later he heard another crack, likely Will being hit even though he already passed out.

He’s going to kill me…

Somehow Dante stayed conscious for another two blows before the sweet, painless darkness of unconsciousness enveloped him.

The first thing he saw when he came back into consciousness was the middle-aged healer from earlier. The woman had beads of sweat covering her pale face as she struggled to get him fully healed. To his relief, the pain that was wracking his body was slowly starting to recede. In Dante’s eyes, the woman was the Goddess.

Standing behind his Goddess, was a smiling monster out of his nightmares. “Good job, you did far better than Will, and even broke the old record of three strikes before you passed out.” He pointed to indicate Will. If Archie hadn’t pointed Will out, he didn’t think he would have recognized him. Different sections of his body were caved in, and he couldn’t see a single place on his body that wasn’t discolored in some way. Dante couldn’t help but shiver, which sent pain through his body, Archie didn’t beat them randomly. He clearly knew what he was doing, or the two of them wouldn’t have survived for so many hits. Even the swords that they were holding at the start of the fight were broken.

Archie was a completely mad, he assumed that he would have stopped beating the two of them after they had both passed out, but that didn’t seem to be the case. He was just happy that he didn’t have a mirror to look at his current condition.

“Since you did so well, I had you patched up first… your welcome. Now that you know what it’s like to get the shit knocked out of you, I’ll teach you how to actually swing that sword tomorrow. We are done for the day, so you can go.”

As if I already didn’t know what it was like to ‘get the shit knocked out of me’… Is every lesson going to end with a healing session?

He didn’t have the energy to be angry at Archie, he was just relieved to be done for the day.

A few minutes later, the healer had him fixed up as good as new, aside from the slight exhaustion from the healing itself, so he picked up the manipulation orb and walked toward where Mia said she would be.

On his way there, Dante saw some of the other instructors work with their students. He began to mutter curses under his breath as he watched all of the other nobles work through different sword forms under their instructor’s supervision. None of them seemed to be nursing broken bones.

Mia was waiting where she said she would be, which surprised him, he wasn’t sure how long Swordsmanship practice was, but knew he finished early.

When she noticed him, she had a look of confusion on her face. “You’re finished early, did something go wrong?”

“I think so… My instructor is evil.”

Mia looked slightly agitated at his news, which surprised him. “What happened?”

Dante released a sigh. “He let me explode a sword I was holding, then beat me unconscious without teaching me anything.”

Her eyebrows narrowed. “Who is your instructor.”

If Mia was planning on going to complain, he was more than happy to let her. “His name is Archie.”

Mia winced. “It was a good thing that you got out early, the other servants were talking about the tournament final that’s about to start. Why don’t we go watch it?”

The wince and instant change of conversation gave him a good idea about how screwed he was by having Archie as his instructor. “What tournament final?”

“Every time a dungeon that the academy owns regenerates its dungeon boss, the academy holds a platinum rank tournament to choose who can kill it.”

That confused him, Layla and Alexander had told him that he could use credits to enter the academy’s dungeon. “I thought that you got entry to dungeons by spending your credits.”

“You can enter the dungeon and kill monsters for essence crystals with credits, but the dungeon boss itself only goes to the tournament winner.”

That made sense, and if the tournament final was about to start it would likely be between the top two students at the academy. The fight could be a valuable learning experience.

Dante nodded to Mia. “Let’s go watch.”