A Dream Foretold.

A New World (3). A Repeat of the Past.

 

“To your left!” her voice screamed as I twisted my body left, swinging my sword horizontally before a black slice flashed, slicing through the air before slicing a fat, sword-wielding orc in half as I swung my sword once more to the right, slicing another orc in half.

 

With each slash, a rain of blood would fall towards my direction; splattering my black dress and painting the matte black blade of my sword in red as a thick stench of iron surrounded us like a storm, a smell that would make your stomach puke.

 

“Hyaa!” a girlish scream echoed from the side as a blue flash flew from my side before another blood rain exploded from a little distance away with a black-haired lady standing at the center of the rain with her silver rapier pointing downwards.

 

Turning around, the lady’s hair flew to the side as winds blew past her, painting a scene of beauty as the falling sun flashed its bright rays of light from behind; her black hair that contrasted the light of the sun, and her pink jade eyes that shine.

 

It was as if a painting, that of a legendary knight who stands before many battlefields, standing on top of dozens to hundreds of dead bodies; a truly wondrous sight that showcased her beauty, the beauty of the person I love.

 

“You should look at your sides more, Amelia…”

 

Her voice echoed from afar as she walked towards my direction whilst beautifully sheathing her rapier on its black narrow sheath as I thrust my sword down to the floor before resting on the floor as I replied with an exhausted voice, “It’s hard to focus on three sides at the same time, you know…”

 

“Well, it’s important to be able to feel where your enemies are, instead of focusing on multiple sides, it’s better you expend that energy onto creating a focus radius instead; a focus radius may be short but the ability to feel every side, whether it’d be from a blindside or a clear side is more important,” she replied as she sat beside me.

 

“It’s easy for you to say, even though it’s been two months since I’ve been trying on creating my own focus radius…” I said looking up at the sky, reaching out to the clouds with my tiny hands before turning my attention to her who was sitting beside me with a smile.

 

“Well, the issue is with how you are imaging out what a focus radius is; let me try to explain it to you in an even clearer method than before, a focus radius is a method in which you rely on other senses, not just your sense of sight.”

 

“The focus radius you are imaging out is being able to see all sides, that’s where you are wrong every time; focus radius is basically the ability to use all the other senses you have, for example, sense of touch and sense of hearing to determine the location of an object,” she explained before closing her eyes and continuing before standing up and kicking a rock from her left side.

 

“Think of it as having several eyes, but those eyes cannot see, rather those eyes can feel instead; one eye can feel the air around you are being replaced with something else, whilst another can hear the sound of even the tiniest dirt being kicked away.”

 

“Your ears act as another eye, telling you which side the dirt was kicked whilst your mana that is dispersed in very tiny pieces with large margins between one another acts as a separate eye that also tells you which zone of the certain side rippled, with only those two data, you’d be able to tell that the rock was kicked from here,” she said vaguely before the handle of her rapier vanished as the sound of a clang echoed.

 

Within a split second, her rapier was on her hand striking the very tip of the rock that she kicked to her left with her eyes still closed tight, “It’s pretty much how it works, every sense your body can utilize will act as a separate eye, supporting one another in helping you determine the exact location of the object.”

 

“… Here I thought you were going to explain it even more clearly, but then nothing changed at all from your explanation,” I said with a wry smile before she turned around with her rapier sheathed and her eyes open, smiling as I sighed.

 

“Well, to be exact, I don’t understand how the mana part works; the senses part is easy to understand, it’s pretty much guessing for the sense part, but the mana part seems to be different which is what I am having difficulty with.”

 

After I explained the part I was having difficulty with, she soon sat back down beside me before opening the pouch that was hanging on her waist and taking out a yellow papyrus paper together with a quill pen before scribbling on the paper.

 

The scribble was like a child’s drawing but more than a child’s drawing, it had meaning; on the papyrus paper was a circle with several dozens of dots all with large distances from one another, each dot was grouped in different numbers, scale, and length between one another.

 

For example, a group of ten dots on the left side was called “Zone L” whilst a group of five dots on the right side was named “Zone R” and so on… ultimately, the drawing turned into a pie chart but instead of colors, it used dots.

 

“Think of this as your mana being spread out, we have zone right with only five dots in comparison to zone left which has ten dots but compared to zone right, each dot of the right zone is larger than the individual dots on zone left.”

 

“The reason why we lessen the number of dots on zone right is because you tend to focus on the right side more than the left as such, we don’t need to allocate many resources onto the right side but rather allocate more onto the blindsides,” she said before drawing a large circle at the center of the chart and naming it, “Amelia”.

 

“Now, imagine this scenario, an orc all of a sudden enters towards your left side where there are many dots spread out acting as air, what do you think would happen?” she asked after drawing another circle that is standing outside of the circle.

 

“The dots wouldn’t move at all, since as you said, they are air…” I replied before she shook her head, “Wrong, the answer is, the dots would ripple like water since they are exactly like air, they take up a silent space that you wouldn’t feel.”

 

“Air wouldn’t really ripple but our mana does as it is a larger substance than air, and if you look even closer to the arrangement of the dots, you will notice that one or two dots are touching the main body over here,” she said before pointing at one dot that touched the circle that was named “Amelia”.

 

“What would happen here once the orc enters the circle is the mana would ripple, or rather move like waves and bump into each other like cards falling down on one another, the dots or rather mana particles would keep bumping into each other until one of them strikes this particular particle,” she said whilst writing an X on the dot that was touching the main body.

 

“And exactly that of a ripple effect, the mana particle that was touching the main body would then notify the main body that an object had entered the zone where it was assigned, allowing you to know that there is an object that had entered through that particular zone and reacts.”

 

It made a little bit more sense to me now, the mana part of the focus radius seems to follow the foundations of the Domina Effect or Ripple effect in which the mana would act as an alert to the caster but there was one issue.

 

“Wouldn’t it expend your mana a lot?” I asked before she answered, “That’s what most magiciantists thought when they first experimented with this technique, but then a realization came to their mind, what would happen if they reduced the size of the mana particles to close to the size of air particles and compensate the space with a separate spell?”

“That’s exactly what they did, the magiciantist specifically Leah Lucia II created a spell that allowed the mana particles to split into very thin and tiny layers almost like a tiny plate which changed the fundamentals of the focus radius system.”

 

Suddenly, soon after she finished speaking, a loud growl echoed from behind us as we turned around before a cute little girl with brown hair and brown eyes stood there dressed in rags with her hair tied in a ponytail, staring at us intently before my hand instinctively moved, pointing my sword at the neck of the little girl.

 

“Who are you?!” I asked with my eyes wide open.