Silas groaned in agony as the rays of light stabbed his eyes. “Get up old man, it's time to get to work.” The old mage moaned as his tormentor ruthlessly pulled back the blinds around the room. Fortunately, he had found the perfect way out of this situation while he had been hunting the cat monster.

“Say, Kira, if you leave me alone for a few more hours, I will tell you how to make nature mana.”

The younger mage paused her task of opening the blinds and looked over at the old man still buried under a mountain of blankets. “When did you figure it out?” She sounded perfectly calm, but there was a sharp glint in her eyes that made him nervous.

“When we were hunting with Gabriel, to be honest. When we came back I tested it more thoroughly to make sure I was right.”

“How long have you known for sure?” He looked away a little guiltily. “Silas.” He looked out the window, it was going to be a rather nice day today. “Silas just tell me.” He finally looked over at his impatient assistant, who was tapping her foot in annoyance. “Honestly sometimes I feel like your mother rather than a helper. Just tell more or else.”

With that final threat, he finally cracked. “About a week.”

“I see.” Kira nodded her head and then stared down at him. “You didn’t think to tell me immediately? I’ve been waiting years to figure out this mana type you know. Don’t tell me you kept it to yourself just so you could sleep in later.” That’s exactly what he had done, but there was no way he was going to admit as much out loud. “Fine, whatever, just tell me, and I'll let you go back to sleep.”

Perfect everything was going according to his master plan. “Right half plant, three-eights of darkness, and one-eighth of fire.”

Kira tilted her head in curiosity. “Hum, so it turned out to need more darkness, at least I was spot on with needing both of the remaining basic elements. Why darkness though, I was positive there would be more fire in the mixture.”

Silas burrowed deeper into his blankets and closed his eyes. She still wasn’t leaving, might as well answer her might make her leave faster. “Darkness, in this case, seems to be considered rot in nature, which is a lot more prevalent in a normal forest than say a forest fire.”

“I see that makes a bit of sense, darkness has a few interesting aspects that can be expressed usually depending on its combination with other elements. It seems similar to the rot element that’s part of the darkness and …” Kira’s voice faded out as he walked out of the room slamming the door behind her. Silas sighed in relief at the blessed silence that enveloped the room and then scowled at the still open blinds. Oh well, it's not like he wanted her to come back, especially when she was in lecture mode. Throwing the blankets over his head, Silas drifted off into a deep sleep.

She focused intently drawing on her plant mana like it was an old friend stable and reliable. Next, she drew out a thread of pure mana, and carefully shaped it into darkness. The element was alien to her, straining her will and bucking her control, but she had practiced long and hard to gain control of this element. Even so, she only managed to transform a small clump of her pure mana into darkness mana. She had to bear down on it with her will to keep it stable, and now came the trickiest part she drew on her mana again and focused intently. “Hey, Kira.”

The darkness mana she had painstakingly gathered puffed apart as it escaped her control. She allowed the plant mana to fade as she opened her eyes and glared at the interruption to her work. “When the door’s closed Arthur it means to not come in.” She practically roared at the unfortunate boy. The younger mage wilted like a flower in a rainstorm, and she heaved a deep breath getting her anger under control. “What is it, and why didn’t you knock?” She was still angry but her voice had at least returned to normal levels.

“I just couldn’t wake master Silas and I have some questions I wanted to ask about. Also, I did knock for quite a while too, but when you didn’t answer I worried that something might be wrong.” There was only a little bit of defensiveness, and slight petulance in the response.

Kira heaved a deep sigh and glared at the ceiling. “Fair enough, I was trying to form the new mana type for my next class.”

Arthur tilted his head looking confused. “New mana type?”

“Yes, you’re tier two right? Silas is probably waiting to mention it until your next tier.” The younger mage looked at her pleadingly, like a lost little puppy. She sighed heavily, a short break would hurt. “I suppose I can explain real quick, but only briefly.” Arthur nodded in enthusiasm. “Right so after tier-three mage classes depend on mana types, like fire, water, wind, and so on. The tricky part is that with whatever element you want to have for your next class you need to be able to have formed it, at least once, ahead of time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Say you want to be a water mage, if you can't manage to for at least a tiny bit of water mana as a tier-three mage, you won’t be able to take water mage as your tier four class. It’s also rather difficult, classes give you a massive bonus for forming elements, and trying to do it without that bonus is incredibly difficult. I can change my pure mana into plant mana just by wanting it to happen, but to turn pure mana into say fire mana I need to really focus. Even then I can only form a small amount of fire mana, which is also very easy to disrupt with distractions, unlike my plant mana which I use in battle.”

“So how do you learn how to control mana types that aren’t a part of your class already?”

Kira took a deep breath and decided she had given enough explanation. “Go ask Silas once he wakes up it should be noon at the latest. I have things to do, so go practice your mana exercises until then, keep focusing on mana shields. Mages need to know it well.” Arthur looked like he was burning to ask more questions, but he reluctantly nodded and left.

She looked over at the clock, it looked like she had spent maybe half an hour on her attempt to form nature mana before she had been interrupted. This time she started with darkness mana carefully shaping the element into being and pinning it in place with her will. Next, she split her focus and began forming fire mana, her darkness mana wobbled dangerously dispersing as it escaped her grip again. Kira had to hold in her exasperation, she knew that it would probably take her a while to get this right. Her shaky control was why Silas had been helping her with possible mana combinations, but it was still frustrating so close to the end. Resolutely she began again, third time’s the charm, right?

Apparently not today, this time the fire mana failed to stabilize at all before she lost her grip on the darkness mana. A few more tries and she was starting to get back into the rhythm of the two elements, finally managing to form both the darkness mana and fire mana. However, when she went to call up her plant mana, her concentration wavered for the briefest moment and all her hard work dissolved into the ether. That was one reason why working with non-class mana was annoying, if you had a class for a particular mana type it would take longer to deaspect back into normal mana on their own, somewhere along the line of days instead of seconds. Most spells exhausted themselves long before that point, making deaspecting a moot point.

Kira took a few minutes to calm down after her last failed attempt then tried again. Haltingly the darkness and fire mana formed, and with only the briefest flicker of a thought plant mana formed as well. This time she managed to maintain all three mana types, now came the hard part. Carefully she allowed portions of the fire mana she had formed to deaspect, leaving her with much more dark mana than fire. She combined the fire and darkness mana with an equal amount of plant mana and held her breath. She didn’t have to wait long though, it only took a few seconds for the mixture to violently yank out of her grip, deaspecting in seconds.

Growling in consternation she thought back over what it had felt like when the combination went wrong. She was pretty sure she didn’t have enough fire mana, at least that was what it had felt like. There was a very precise way to measure how much of each type of mana she was using, which was compounded by her shaky control of fire and darkness mana. Silas might have given her the right proportions, but it was still going to take a while to get this right.

It would be so much more convenient if she had natural affinities for those two elements. She chuckled to herself, most people didn’t have any natural affinities and here she was grumbling that she didn’t have two more. She just needed to put in the work, she had spent years chasing this class and now it was finally within reach. She wasn’t going to let something minor like uncooperative elements get in her way.

It took her dozens of tries, each time altering the formula slightly getting closer and closer to her goal. It was difficult, make no mistake, but with the right element formula and a bucket load of hard-headed determination, succeeding eventually was just an eventuality. Kira watched in delight as the elements blended themselves in a beautiful light show. She grasped the finished product for barely a second, gazing down in wonder at her hard-earned goal, nature mana.

Releasing her grip on the power she collapsed to the floor of her room and looked out the window. It was dark already, well she would consider this a wasted day, more a day well spent. With great anticipation she opened her class list, searching for a new choice. Sure enough, there was nature mage sitting right where it should be, it was a good thing that class evolutions weren’t timed. Confirming her choice she lay back as the changes rippled through her body.

Kira chuckled with all that time and effort just a push of a button and she was tier five. She was looking forward to getting back to leveling, she had spent so much time finding this new mana type hopefully it would all be worth it. She took that thought by the throat and ruthlessly throttled it. She would make this work no matter what nature mana ended up doing, it was a direct upgrade of her plant mana so it had to be better.

Curiosity almost overwhelmed her, she could feel her new mana affinity just waiting to be used. It had washed away her old plant mana affinity, but that was the price to pay on this path to power. She sighed and got ready for bed, even with her new tier five status, she was tired, an entire day of constant focus really wore her out. She’d get a handle on her new power tomorrow when she was properly rested. However, she wasn’t able to resist temptation completely and released a cloud of nature mana to float around her bed. She giggled like a little girl, the free-floating mana particles looked like golden pollen floating in the breeze. She thought she would be too amped up to sleep, but as soon as she closed her eyes darkness claimed her.

Arthur sighed in defeat as he looked outside at the pitch darkness, and then back at the door to master Silas’s room. He had been here almost all day, and Silas still hadn’t woken up, and it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part. He had tried to break the door down a few times, but no matter how hard he hit the blasted thing, it never made any noise. He didn’t want to bother Kira again, she seemed to be busy, but he might have to if Silas still wasn’t up by tomorrow.

With a sigh, he decided it was time for him to head to bed as well. He paused for a moment, thinking about what he had wanted to ask his master. It might have been a fluke, he should check just to be sure. Arthur took a deep breath and pulled on his mana, it flowed pure and strong answering his call as it always did. He took the power in hand and twisted somehow if someone asked him he wouldn’t even be able to describe what he was actually doing. It just felt right, and that was as best he could describe it. Staring down at his hand he watched the tiniest of flames dance over his unharmed palm, shining in all of its terrible beauty.