“So? What’s your answer?”, she pushed me.

“Sure, I would like to,” I responded, mimicking her smile.

She smiled brightly, entered the rings and walked towards me.

“Great! What’s your name?”

I got into guard.

“My name is John Doe. Pleasure to make your acquaintance”

She did the same.

“Well John, get ready, because I won’t pull my punches!”

Uttered these words, Lily unsheathed her greatsword. She swung it in the air with a single hand showing her proficiency, before grasping it with both hands and pointing its tip towards me, while keeping the handle positioned above her head. The weapon was shorter than her height but the blade was unusually broad.

It had to be quite unbalanced towards the front, but she was swinging it freely through the air like it was weightless, as one would expect from one of the future hardest hitters of the planet.

I followed her example and gripped my mace.

“Show me what you got!”, she yelled, running towards me.

In a fraction of a second she shortened the distance between us. A dense blue aura flowed out from her pores and covered her body and weapon in a thin layer. She took a final step and her foot hit the ground, cracking it.

She whirled the greatsword above her head, before slashing it horizontally towards my head. I raised my shield, readying myself to absorb the impact. Suddenly, I felt a pulling force originate from the greatsword, tugging me towards it. Even the ambient mana started to react to this unforeseen force, following it in its path.

A series of alarms went off in my head. I immediately let go of my shield and retracted my hand just in time to see the greatsword cleanly cleave it in half, without even any sign of decelerating. I ducked down at the last moment, barely avoiding the worst case scenario. Unfortunately, Lily was able to respond to my sudden motion. She rotated the greatsword around its axis and hit me with the plate of the blade on the left side of the head.

A shockwave travelled through my body and shuffled my internal organs around. The blast radiated from my right side and expanded towards the crowd, causing the ground under my feet to vibrate and debris to fall around.

This was one of the reasons why she was such a force to be reckoned with. In this world, there was a group of archumans capable of generating phenomena impossible to anyone else. They could employ their aura to bend an aspect of the world to their will, making the impossible possible or the abstract concrete.

The ones belonging to this group of people could be counted on the fingers of one hand and they took the name of Spellcasters. They were the ones who would go on to form the hero’s team and they were called as such despite the usual reticence of archs about speaking in terms of magic, not even when referring to genai’s mana manipulation capabilities. This underlined how peculiar of a phenomenon spellcasting really was.

Lily Miller was indeed one of those people, but what she had just done didn’t exactly qualify as spellcasting, as it was much older than that. The aura technique she had just employed was inherited from her father's side and dated back to one of the first generations of archumans.

The technique, which I had informally named “Go with the tide”, enabled her to produce a pulling force from her weapon which first attracted surrounding air, debris and mana increasing the inertia of the swing, then upon contact or at will released the amassed material, generating a shockwave. The force running over the target behaved similarly to a tidal wave, dragging everything along its path.

Once my internal organs stopped swirling around, I fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes. The strong shockwave resonated inside and caused something to detach from somewhere. I felt it move around inside my head. The pressure inside my skull rose to dangerous levels and I felt my head was ready to explode.

My cranial box creaked but just before it broke, I heard a pop and a wave of extreme relief washed over me. I felt like an opaque curtain had been removed from my eyes and despite the rearrangement of my insides I felt incredibly energised.

“Oh, what a shame. I hoped he would last longer than the others. But, oh well, what can we d…”

“So there were these tiny bastards inside my head,” I spoke, interrupting her words.

Under my eyes, there were a number of stone-like pieces of clotted blood and brain matter. I took one between my fingers and held it against the sun. Although it was biological in nature, it presented a crystalline appearance. It was a lump of etherized brain matter and together with its friends it had been embedded inside my head for all this time, probably since the forming surgery.

I couldn’t contain my laugh. These were the kind of things which usually killed normal humans and archs alike. Mana decayed into ether inside your body or you directly inhaled it, and then it bound itself to your tissues changing your metabolism and/or their mechanical properties, causing anomalies and consequent premature departure.

Archs’ bodies were naturally able to dispose of bio-accumulated ether, but it seemed like these one had crystallised deep inside of my organs during the surgery, resisting excretion. Nevertheless, thanks to Lily’s smack causing my insides to shift around, my brain was now finally free from the undesirable guests.

I was delighted. The veil over my eyes had been removed and I could finally truly see again. Waves of repressed emotions flooded through me. The pleasure of being alive had returned and I was now ready to violently embrace the world in front of me once again.

I thought back to the days following the surgery, where I had moved around like an apathetic idiot with anger management issues. I was now ready to beat up anything and anyone life would throw at me with a smile on my lips. Maybe that was a tad bit overboard, but the point I was trying to make to myself was clear. This was enough for me and it wasn’t like there was a need for me to explain it to anyone else.