“No.” A deathly silence descended onto the room as Kamin uttered that one word.

 

 

Lock snickered behind his hands, watching Archibald's face turn from confusion to bitterness. A failed relationship between parent and child was a gift that never stopped giving it seemed. Sipping some more of the tea Lock watched the proceedings. Or rather the lack thereof. Archibald was simply looking at his daughter like he'd swallowed a lemon, and Kamin was serenely turning her nose up at him.

 

 

More than just a little crybaby then. Why she reminded a bit of Lock himself in his youth actually. Little spitfire languishing in life due to not having yet found his purpose, but absolutely willing to take it up with anybody if they looked at him wrong.

 

 

 

“As we've previously discussed, you don't have a choice in this. You forfeited it with your incessant refusal to contribute to the family in other ways.” Archibald calmly said.

 

 

“I don't have a choice.” She said, nodding, and then pointed at Lock, or, well, at his left shoulder. Maybe slightly above it? “But he does.” She finished.

 

 

A spitfire. However she also appeared to be a moron.

 

 

“While it is true that I wouldn't betroth myself to an unwilling girl, it seems a bit foolish to refuse here. You will once again find yourself choice-less when confronted with another suitor if this betrothal falls through.” Lock said, trying to bring up a point that she had obviously missed.

 

 

Kamin blushed and snapped her fingers. “I hadn't thought of that.” She said, and put a hand somewhere into her kimono, presumably to pull out a pen.

 

 

“Wait a second though.” Lock said, freezing her in place. “Why did you say no, as you mentioned earlier, unwillingness isn't one of my fetishes.”

 

 

Bringing a finger up to her lips the girl seemed to think on her answer, before giving it. “I wanted to annoy father.” She admitted.

 

 

Lock laughed. Kamin signed the contract and pushed it towards him. Instead of signing it however, how even, he didn't have a pen, Lock picked it up and started reading.

 

 

He heard Archibald sigh as he delved into the frankly to-the-point contract. Used to much worse from his previous world he quickly finished it, detecting no malicious tampering. He even channelled some mana into it to check for any magical shenanigans.

 

 

He stretched out a hand to Kamin, and after a few seconds of waiting accompanied the gesture with the question, “Can I borrow your pen for a bit?” He asked, and promptly had the utensil deposited past his hand and onto the table.

This would take some getting used to.

 

 

Looking at Kamin's oddly flowery signature, written boldly across some text instead of the marked line, he scribbled down his own chicken scratch and returned the pen. He turned to Archibald. “Can we get some copies of this?”

 

-/-

 

 

 

It was much later in the day that Lock found himself in a small training ground behind his fiancée's house with his pupil Harald. He needed to specify which pupil, as he apparently had two of them now. Although he'd only start with Kamin tomorrow.

 

 

For now he'd tasked her with compiling information about the skill they needed to train, how she felt about it, and how she thought they might improve it. Copies of the family documents pertaining the skill had been delivered to his room. Which was quite tasteful, soured only by the demeanour of the servant who'd shown him too it.

He would peruse the documents after training Harald. “So, is your aim still to become a powerful swordsman?” Lock asked, at which his student simply nodded.

 

 

“Alright, we'll continue with the same training as before then,” Lock raised a finger, “but first, I want to talk about swords a bit.”

 

 

“What's there to talk about?” Harald asked.

 

 

“What is a sword?” Lock shot back, causing his student to furrow his brows.

 

 

“A weapon?”

 

 

Lock picked up a pebble and chucked it at the boy. “Wrong.”

 

 

Harald dodged, and looked quite affronted really. “What, wrong?”

 

 

“A sword is just as much a tool as a hoe is, it's simply been romanized due to the power it represents.” Lock said, causing Harald to snort.

 

 

“Power,” he sneered, “it's a piece of metal."

 

 

“Gold is for the mistress,silver for the maid,

 

copper for the craftsman, plying his trade,

 

the baron smirked in his splendours hall

 

iron, cold iron, however, rules them all.”

 

 

Lock recited. “Do you understand?” He asked.

 

 

Harald shook his head.

 

 

“The sword is a tool, but every tool has a very narrow field of application, where it rules supreme. The sword, represents violence, power over others, and in that regard, freedom. Power is measured by the change that you can inflict onto the world around you. A sword is an agent of violence, an agent of power.” Lock said, closely observing Harald to see if he understood.

 

 

“You're talking about it as if it had a mind of it's own.” Harald said.

 

 

“Does it not?” Lock mused. “Let's say perhaps that you are walking down the road, and are confronted with a malnourished bandit armed with a club. He tries to rob you. If you were unarmed in that situation, you would likely give him what he wants. If you had a sword however...” Lock trailed off.

 

 

“I'd cut him down.” Harald said, crossing his arms.

 

 

“Yes, a sword is power, power changes the way you interact with the world. One can go mad from it. As most people with too much power are wont to do.”

 

 

“What are you trying to tell me?”

 

 

“Perhaps the second most important skill one needs to have when wielding a sword, is not how to wield it, but to know when not to wield it.” Lock said, drawing his sword from where it was strapped across his back. He also pulled out a piece of paper.

 

 

Throwing it in the air he slashed at it, only for the paper to attach itself to the blade, refusing to be cut by it. An application of mana, a small gimmick that he'd learned to use while bored. To Harald however, it must have looked like an application of near divine skill with a blade. Lock re-sheathed his sword. The paper fluttered to the ground unharmed.

 

Harald looked confused, and slightly indulgent.

 

 

The kind of look people had when talking to their already senile grandparents who weren't making all too much sense.

He said nothing.

 

 

It reminded Lock of himself. Back when he'd been, what, 15 or so? He'd had the rare chance to talk to an astronaut, who had uttered some meaningless words that had haunted him for the rest of his life. 'Impossible is the word cowards use to describe things they are too afraid to pursue.' The man's words had been just that, words, and the man obviously hadn't really given them much thought, but they had kept reappearing in Lock's mind whenever he struggled under the burden of conformity.

 

 

Chasing immortality. It was impossible. It was irrational. But as Hume had so succinctly put it. 'The rational is a tool to chase something that is not.'

 

 

A blade failing to cut a piece of paper. A meaningless little trick. It was an illusion. But it was an illusion that he instinctively felt would chase Harald for quite some time. Hopefully.

 

 

It was an experiment at best really. Lock felt curious if he could bullshit his way into a sage-like status.

 

 

He picked up his wooden sword and pointed his killing intent at the still absently smiling Harald, who shocked into motion, as if he'd been assailed by a pail of cold water.

 

 

“You're not going to put away your armour?” Harald asked hesitantly as he grew slightly taller.

 

 

“No.” Lock answered.

 

 

“That's not fair.” Harald muttered as he started analysing his teacher's get-up for any weaknesses. He then sighed and attacked.

 

 

Lock was slightly surprised, but smiled nonetheless. Complaining about unfairness was a favourite past time of philistines. It was good to see that Harald was at least nominally leaving their ranks.

 

 

-/-

 

 

Lock contemplated what he'd just learned as he sat in his mostly empty room, futon still rolled up, surrounded by scrolls. All three of them. First was a very basic explanation of how electricity worked and was utilised by mages, the second was on the skill that allowed Kamin to see, the aptly-named electro-sense, and the third was by far the longest, containing the accounts of people who'd learned the skill and how they'd sought to improve it.

 

 

It was all fairly uncomplicated really.

 

 

A Trydan wove his mana reserves into something resembling electricity closely enough that they didn't need to actively think on producing electricity, simply doing so whenever they used mana.

 

 

How exactly this was achieved was kept vague, likely as a defence against someone stealing the technique.

 

 

It didn't bother Lock however, all that he needed to know was that attaining the skill electro-sense had forcibly adjusted most of Kamin's mana reserves to a sort of pseudo-electricity. Potential electricity if one wanted to be exact.

 

 

This elemental bundle inside oneself was necessary to create a relative comparison to the electricity found in one's surroundings. The surroundings that one observed by passively generating an infinitely weak electrical field, which bombarded the brain with signals of differing strength dependant on the amount of electricity found.

 

 

It reminded Lock of a computer network, but much more complex. A person using the skill was in the middle of a ball, an almost infinite amount of vectors connecting them to every single coordinate point in this ball. At all times, several times per second, every vector was being charged weakly by the mage, and received feedback that was not binary, but relative to oneself, on the electrical charge it had encountered.

 

 

The entire thing honestly sounded like suicide. No brain could handle that much information. This led him to conclude that the entire process was mostly automated by mana, or the structure of the spell itself. The person using the skill likely had a world-view comparable to, everything was sand, but some grains were rougher than others. It was their job then to interpret their findings, to see shapes in the waves of electrical currents bombarding their brain.

 

 

Incidentally this was how the skill was described in the third scroll, albeit the metaphor was not one utilizing sand, but instead compared it to mana sensing. Which worked under the same principle, simply reporting the concentration of mana encountered. Mana sensing however was much simpler, since there was a finite amount of mana in one's surroundings, while technically speaking everything was electrically charged. To some extent at least.

 

 

However since the awareness one had of the electrical charges was relative in comparison to the marked mana residing within one's body, the electrical charges of single atoms were likely not even shown.

 

 

This was problematic. For most people using the skill this had been helpful, it had bypassed the issue of sensory overload, and had only shown them things that were high in charge. Such as living beings trying to sneak up on them, and statically charged doorknobs. These people however were not blind, they could rely on their eyes too see and avoid things that were invisible to the skill.

 

Kamin would need to be able to determine the difference in electrical charges present in normal air, and walls. And while the difference was immense, like multiplicative. In relation to living beings it was puny, and hard to distinguish. Probably.

 

The only hope Lock really saw for Kamin, was that she was probably the person with the lowest mana capacity to ever possess the skill. This meant that her relative electrical imprint was small, which made it likelier for her to become capable of detecting the miniscule charges of low-charge objects.

 

 

It also meant that it was advantageous for Kamin to progress in nothing else but the skill, since actively working on things pertaining magic had the habit of raising one's mana capacity.

 

 

Now in regards to training...

 

 

He had plenty of ideas. After confirming some of his hypothesis with Archibald, who even if he was unable to answer, would be able to point him to someone who could, he could even start implementing some of them.