Iranueel tried to follow his body razing straight at him but wasn’t very successful. But he managed to get his own sword in a defensive stance that got in Razell’s way. Not that it helped him very much. His opponent was trained and developed for close combat and Iranueel wasn’t.

He was pushed back and thrown onto his back by the overwhelming power of the swordmaster before him.

Razell stood a bit of in a daze after he knocked him back.

“I know that you shouldn’t give such information away but what in the hell is your strength? The weakest of my pupils seems to have more power in his arms than you?”

Iranueel stood up ashamed of himself.

“I invested most of my stats in my mental facilities for increasing my mage powers. So there hasn’t been much left for my muscles. I only have a strength of 9. Sorry, if this is not enough for challenging you.”

Iranueel waited with sunken shoulders and hanging head for an answer but there never came one, so he looked up to see Razell grinning at him.

“Boy, you never have been a challenge to begin with. But I honor the will to fight in someone. You knew that you couldn’t fight on equal terms with me, but you did not falter in the face of defeat. I know of some ways to make a swordfighter out of you, but it will need some serious investment of power into it, but you will not have to change your actual stat build for it. It’s called a swordmage, a wizard who uses his arcane power for fighting with a sword and defending his compatriots. You have to learn some special powers for it and then train hard to master it, but even I would have some serious problems with a capable swordmage. And now go and take a bath and think about it. If you choose this way, I will come with you for some time to train you and defend Misako from harm.”

He turned his back to Iranueel and walked to the biggest building whistling some song the young avatar didn’t recognize.

“Oh, and keep the sword as long as you are inside this compound. We will train again even if you don’t choose the way of the sword. You seem to have a basic understanding of fighting with a blade and that’s something I don’t find so often nowadays.”

Iranueel was somewhat disappointed by his own weakness but he also knew that he would have to be many years older if he wanted to be a serious challenger for the older avatar. But there was one thing he remembered from his life as a mortal. And that was when he played D&D, a pen and paper roleplaying game. In it there was a character class called swordmage. He suspected now, that someone in the development department was an avatar himself when he knew about swordmages.

Thinking back he recalled that s swordmage could always call his chosen blade to himself. He didn’t have a personal blade and he didn’t want to claim the mithril sword, so perhaps there was a way for creating his own unique sword by combining his magical powers. He already combined them when he tried himself at healing and id something can be used for creating, it can also be used for destruction.

If you recall humanity’s history it was most of the time the other way around. First came the use of destruction and then after some time the creation. The nuclear science was just one of the latest inventions in this way of applying knowledge.

Now he tried to force all of his six magical forces into one sphere hovering an arm’s length before his chest. They resisted fiercely and tried to break out of it whenever they came into contact with their opposite element, but he pressed them even harder together and watched his mana and stamina plummet to the ground. When they reached rock bottom his health began to decline also and pain erupted with a strong migraine.

Blood began to pour out of his nose and every bone ached like somebody mistreated him heavily.

Razell just looked back this moment to Iranueel and saw a blinding light as big as the head of a needle illuminating Iranueel when an explosion of force threw the younger man across the training court. It was the same court that saved Iranueel’s life because it protected its user from dying in a limited way. Razell had forgotten to dismiss his duel challenge with Iranueel so the protection was still active.

Iranueel’s battered and bloody corpse lay at the edge of the place and showed only small signs of life. The young man was on his back and stared into the sky reading a prompt he received after the explosion.

You have received arcane mastery.