Chapter 7: Chapter 8

The space that Estella saw beyond the field and inside the ship confused her brain. She checked the outside to be sure her mind wasn’t just playing tricks on her. But what she was seeing should have been impossible - a space within the ship that was about the size of a large stadium. “What the hell is this Doctor Who bullshit?”

“This is definitely not nano-compression,” Natalia agreed, finally also shutting her jaw. Estella noticed both of her sisters had also been flabbergasted.

“Correct. This is magi-tech. The Librarians combined their efforts to create the space you see before you, a mixture of the use of magic and technology,” Gartho said, as he and Tharen went inside, and the girls followed. “They envisioned this as a multi-purpose space, whether it be for carrying large numbers of people, or as a space for training exercises, for example. For now, this will be where you three can get to grips with your new powers and equipment discreetly.”

“Looks like you guys hurriedly tossed quite a bit of stuff in here,” Anja noted, which drew Estella’s attention to a bunch of steel crates near the doorway.

“Yeah, training equipment and all that jazz, all stored in capsules. Hadn’t had time to get everything set up. You gals think you could help with that?” Tharen asked.

Estella chuckled, hands on hips, “sure, might as well. Better that we get to it now so we don’t have to do it in the morning.”

There wasn’t any disagreement from her sisters, so they immediately wasted no time setting things up.

With some direction from the two GDF officers, they began assembling a makeshift training ground. The capsules varied in size depending on their specific contents, and they were stored in racks inside the crates, which made it easy to organise them as they set up a small space to store the capsules as well. The capsules had a function that projected a full-sized hologram of their contents where the user aimed, that made it easy for placement of objects, with controls even for rotation before placement.

It took half an hour for everything to get set up - training dummies, fake terrain and roads, a firing range, fake buildings, and other assorted odds and ends to create a decent training ground. Off on its own corner were a collection of large pods, which Tharen had mentioned were full-body simulation chambers.

“Alright, this should work just fine. You gals will be interacting with hard-light hologram drones for training against simulated adversaries and target dummies. Natalia can use the terrain and the track for learning how to drive with the vehicles. Don’t worry about damaging the ship, this space has been heavily reinforced,” Tharen said. “And last but certainly not least, you guys will spend a lot of your time using the sim chambers for practical training.”

Gartho opened up one of the chambers to demonstrate. They all had a cylindrical shape, and looked more than large enough for full body movement. “These simulation chambers provide lifelike simulations, including emulating all known stimuli detected by biological senses. The chambers keep you in the centre but will simulate movement, momentum and force, among other things, providing full physical benefits as if you were training for real. It will even detect mana use and safely discharge it while simulating spellcasting, though it’s not quite as effective if you intend to use it for exercising your mana reserve limits. They are all fully connected to each other, allowing for shared simulations.”

Estella took a peek inside. Every surface was fully padded for the safety of the user. Still, there was one thing that bugged her. “I’m not gonna be able to swing Galowye in here.”

“That will not be a problem. The Librarians already made adjustments to accommodate both Galowye and Prometheus without needing to explicitly form them both physically,” Gartho said. “I will stay out here to monitor things. Tharen will take you through how to use the training chambers.”

“Alright, you need to wear these things around your necks,” Tharen instructed, handing the girls each a black circular band, before putting his on around his neck, demonstrating that it was stretchy and easy to put on. “They’re the main interface which you’ll need to actually use the simulator. All you need to do is say ‘simulation start’ once you’re in.” He then entered one of the chambers.

Estella put hers on, as did her sisters. She was surprised how simple it was, and how she could barely feel it around her neck. She stepped into the chamber, closing the door behind her, and took a deep breath. “Simulation start.”

Then she found herself being lifted into the air, moved to a spot right in the centre. She saw the main simulator interface appear before her, which showed an existing shared simulation started by Tharen. She tapped the icon with her finger, which she was surprised felt like a glass surface.

Then she felt her feet touch down on solid ground, as a new world formed around her.

The first thing that hit her was the humidity, but the immediate environment clued her in to why, as she was surrounded by tall, thick trees with canopies that covered much of the view of the sky above, and the ground was covered in leaves, branches and other dead foliage. Her first instinct was to guess that she was in a topical rainforest of some kind. But the actual flora surrounding her was like nothing she had ever seen before. “Galowye… You can see what I’m seeing, right?”

“Indeed I do, Estella,” Galowye said. “I must say, this simulation is incredibly lifelike.”

“No kidding,” Estella replied, bending down to pick up some leaves, which she crumpled in her hands. They were kind of moist, but still crunched in her fingers. She took a quick sniff of them, before dropping them to the forest floor. Her hand was partially covered in dirt and mud. “Crap, I don’t wanna wipe this on my clothes…”

“Move Matter will do just fine for a cleaning spell, and considering how little needs to be moved, it’s almost free to cast,” Galowye advised her. “Just focus on what you need to move.”

Estella switched in the runes ‘Motus’ and ‘Materia’, and used them as Galowye suggested, focusing on the foreign matter. She was amazed to see the muck just slip off her hand and away from her, leaving it almost spotless. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do well enough. “So there is a spell for that sort of thing, but just moving it is weird. I thought you’d just get rid of the dirt entirely.”

“That would require converting the matter to energy, which is frankly a massive waste of mana and also something you are not skilled enough to perform,” Galowye sighed.

“Fair enough. Let’s just go find the others,” Estella said, forming her armour and summoning Galowye to her hand, and started magically scanning for nearby human and Piancar life forms, as she advanced, cutting through vines and other thick foliage.

❖

Estella couldn’t help but feel immense relief when she and her sisters managed to find each other about ten mintues later in something of a forest clearing. Though she knew this was just a simulation and in theory everyone involved was perfectly safe, this just felt so real that feeling worried for her sisters was a subconscious instinct. “Nice to know we can find each other.”

“I’ve got some kind of ability to sense life force or something,” Anja said, wearing Prometheus but with her ‘helmet’ down. “Was just a matter of distinguishing you guys from all the flora around here.”

“And my suit’s got its own sensors and ‘radar’, to put it simply,” Natalia noted, her helmet disappearing. “Where are we, anyway?”

“You ladies are in a simulation of my home planet, Threese!” Tharen’s voice caused them all to look up, to see him hanging from a large branch. “Of course, it ain’t all like this, but in the rainforests, we Piancar learned to climb. To get to food, of course, but also to escape from the nasty predators on the ground.”

Estella heard the sounds of growling nearby, and she spun towards the sound, sword at the ready. Emerging from behind the trees were several large feline-like creatures resembling tigers, but with four red eyes and brown and dark green fur that seemed to act as camouflage in this dense rainforest. They had sharp fangs, along with two large sabre tooth tiger-like teeth. Estella frowned, “like those guys, I assume.”

“Yep! You gotta either climb or fight, and those big guys are nasty. But I think they’ll be good starting opponents for your training!” Tharen chuckled. “Good luck!”

Anja and Natalia quickly put their helmets back on, and stood their ground. Estella chuckled, sword in both hands, pushing down the instinctive fear bubbling up inside of her. Who wouldn’t feel fear in a situation like this, even if by all rights it wasn’t real? But that was a good thing. It meant she could train herself to get a better handle on that fear.

Plasma shots from Natalia’s rifle flew past her as the alien felines charged, moving erratically as they spread out. Estella saw a couple of them get shot down immediately, but the others managed to get through, with one pouncing at Estella from the side, trying to get past her sword.

Too slow. She drove the blade through its torso, flinging the body away. She winced at the the blood that had spilt out, covering Galowye. Another thing she would need to get used to.

That moment of limited focus on the situation at hand was enough for two more of the felines to tackle her to the ground, the beasts furiously clawing and biting at her, confused by the fact they weren’t hitting flesh. Estella grabbed one of them by the head and simply used electricity to fry the feline’s head, allowing her to throw it off and drive her sword through the other one, quickly killing it.

She noticed her sisters being attacked by the other beasts, with Natalia shooting down a couple more and fending off a third with her rifle’s blade, shooting it as well to make sure it stayed down. Anja was being attacked on all sides, but multiple spikes that extended from her body pierced the attacking beasts, dealing with them instantly, leaving bodies crumpling to the ground.

“Not bad, not bad at all. It was your second fight, after all, and just a simulation, so I can forgive some slip-ups,” Tharen remarked, as he dropped down to the forest floor.

“Ugh, not used to the blood, though,” Natalia said, sounding rather squeamish. Estella also noticed the blood splattered on herself, and winced. She hadn’t been bothered by the lack of blood when fighting the doppelganger monsters, but this was a different thing altogether.

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“You girls are just gonna have to get over it,” Tharen sighed, “combat is a messy thing, I’m afraid.” He noticed Anja was standing in place, not moving a muscle. “Anja, you alright?”

Anja shook her head, her helmet coming off, “yeah, just… Needed a moment.”

Estella realized of course Anja would be the most bothered about the blood, all things considered. She was just surprised that her sister’s reaction to it hadn’t been worse.

Tharen seemed initially concerned, but he shrugged, “we’ll just have to keep workin’ on that, I guess. I think that’s enough simulation training for your first time.”

❖

Now out of the simulation and back in the training grounds on the ship, Estella’s first major session of magic training was mostly going through various runes in the middle of an area with a large shield, so she wouldn’t be able to outright cause a lot of damage elsewhere in the training grounds.

She was surrounded by drones, remotely forming dummy constructs below them. The drones themselves were shielded, but the constructs used a form of artificial ‘instant matter’ that could easily reform into whatever form was needed. Estella had wondered why they didn’t use the stuff for everything until she discovered firsthand just how light and fragile it was. But it was useful for reusable training dummies, even if they basically got smashed rather easily.

It was only now that Estella had time to properly go over the list that she realized there was at least fifty runes, the vast majority of them usable as main spell functions. There were a small collection of runes purely designed to be ‘modifiers’ for shapes and formations. Most of the classical elements were covered, along with a variety of different concepts, ranging from heat to sound to space and so many more.

Right now, she was just attacking training dummies with different spell effects, switching runes and trying out new combinations. Most of her simplest offensive spells were projectiles, of course. And with multiple core elements to play with, such as fire, electricity, wind, water, ice, light, dark, and earth. Fire, electricity and light were pretty simple, two of them just being forms of energy and the other being a chemical process. Wind was just moving air, though to make it at all effective she had to condense and compact the air to make it actually do damage. Water could be gathered from moisture in the air or by combining oxygen with hydrogen, and ice was just an extension of that, though both could be created via converting energy to matter, which was still something she wasn’t skilled at doing efficiently. Dark was something she had to properly wrap her head around, however, considering it was essentially the concept of the absence of light given physical form, and earth required either displacing dirt and rock or creating it from energy, which was much more challenging than water.

Eventually, she stopped to take a breather, panting as she sat down. Sure, this was good training, but she could only get so far by herself. “Galowye, you got any idea on how I can not completely drain myself just doing basic projectiles?”

Galowye, for his part, seemed rather flustered by this line of questioning. “I’m afraid I can only do so much to help with that. I’m just a sword, after all. I understand some of the basic theory, but I wasn’t around when my previous wielders learned the basics themselves. In ideal circumstances you should’ve learned all the fundamentals long before you became my knight.”

“Yikes, so I’m just an amateur playing at being an Arcane Knight right now,” Estella sighed. “Terrific.”

“Give yourself a little more credit than that, but otherwise, you aren’t entirely wrong,” Galowye replied. “Knowing your limits is an important part of being a warrior. Admitting to weakness and lack of experience is nothing to be ashamed of. I believe you have an enormous amount of potential, and you are doing marvellously well for someone with barely any formal training, but don’t let it go to your head. Expand your limits in training, but be aware of them in combat.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to keep me humble, ‘old man’,” Estella chuckled. “But seriously, I get it, you’re doing your best to guide me. I appreciate it.”

“Of course I need to keep you humble, the worst kind of Arcane Knight is one who has let their ego run wild,” Galowye remarked. “You have a long, long way to go before you can even think of resting on your laurels.”

Estella smiled. Having a talking sword as a constant companion was a bit weird, but she figured she could get used to it. Still, the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to help teach her basically meant she was mostly on her own in terms of figuring out the subtleties of spellcraft, at least for now.

Still, it was only now hitting her that she was really using magic. Supernatural power beyond the understanding of scientific knowledge. And it was awesome. She was awesome. Oh, right, right. Kinda awesome, she supposed. She still needed to work on that ‘humility’ thing, she had a feeling Galowye wouldn’t approve of such self-aggrandising thoughts. But still. MAGIC. FREAKING MAGIC. It was just hard to understate just how dope that was. She was a genuine mage! Albeit an amateur one. Again. Humility.

Though, now she suddenly had an idea, and sprung to her feet, switching in the ‘Ikehu’ (Energy) rune. She put the bottoms of her wrists together, stretched her hands back, and brought them to her right side, muttering a simple chant, as she used the spell ‘Energy Missile’ and shaping it with the ‘Beam’ modifier, focusing on a string of targets in a line, charging mana into the spell as energy sparked in her hands…

“Young lady, what in the Lord’s name are you-”

“HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” She thrust her hands forward, unleashing the spell as a surging beam of energy that crashed through the training dummies, blowing away their instant matter completely, leaving just the drones intact, albeit with heavily drained shields, and the beam itself crashed into the exterior shield, causing it to spill out and away in an way that wasn’t the explosion that Estella had expected. Estella, for her part, felt dizzy and drained when the beam subsided, collapsing onto her back. “Holy craaaaaaap that was exhausting.”

“Should I even ask why you did that?” Galowye asked incredulously. “It was showy and impressive, and would no doubt do a lot of damage if it actually hit a target, but you’d need a lot more training before you can fire off something like that more consistently. That looked vaguely like a martial arts technique from the east. Where did you get the idea to do it?”

“Grew up watching anime where characters did awesome shit like that,” Estella laughed. God, that was such a thrill, even if she was basically out of mana right now. “Wooorrrrtttthhhh iiiiiittttt.”

Galowye was stammering and stunned silent by this response, taking about a minute to finally just sigh. “You are a strange young lady. Recreating a feat from fiction, how childish… Then again, a little childishness isn’t so bad, just don’t indulge it in when things get serious.”

“I’ll try not to,” Estella chuckled.

“Oh, lovely, going to have to strengthen the shields on the drones, otherwise you’re just going to destroy them eventually,” Gartho sighed as he came over, inspecting a camera replay of what just happened. “Maybe a secondary shield unit with a wireless transmission field might work…”

“Sorry, couldn’t help myself,” Estella laughed, finally able to sit up again. “Don’t tell me you actually underestimated what we could do?”

“We tried to overcompensate for your early capabilities, but it seems you might actually outpace them,” Gartho replied, shaking his head with a chuckle. “It’s fine, we can work with this.”

“Right… Don’t worry about me, I’m sure I’ll get better at using my mana. How’re my sisters?” Estella asked, deciding to change topics.

“Natalia is having the time of her life with the vehicles, that’s for sure,” Gartho remarked, glancing over to the racetrack. Estella could hear the sounds of an engine over there, and considering the delighted squealing she had heard earlier, that sounded pretty accurate as far as Nat was concerned. “Anja is doing fine with her own training, though she still seems a little shaken after the simulation. We know she has depression, but her reaction was almost like… PTSD.”

“The blood and the bodies probably caused a flashback to what gave her depression in the first place,” Estella said. “I really hope it doesn’t set back her progress… What the hell is she gonna tell her therapist?”

Gartho checked a holographic screen, which Estella couldn’t read, but she saw the photo of Anja and figured it was probably her file that they had. Gartho’s eyes widened a bit, and he sighed, “yes, that probably explains it. If we could get a Quisivo shrink in here to handle that problem, perhaps, we could accelerate her mental treatment, but that’s not an option at the moment.”

“Quisivo?”

“Psychic rock-people. We can give you a full rundown of some of the main galactic species another time,” Gartho chuckled.

“Right. I think I should check up on them,” Estella groaned, standing up. “I think I’m done training.”

“Of course, today has been quite productive,” Gartho chuckled. “We’ll still be here, if you need anything.”

Estella smiled and nodded, heading off in Anja’s direction. Still, she realized that this only the start of all of this, and she doubted it would get any easier from here on out.

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