Luke Everhart
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Chapter 286 - The Next Step Forward?
🕑 Added 2025-07-02 10:16:14 +0000 UTCThe rain didn’t ease overnight, and its constant droning kept pulling Nar into memories in the darkness of the B-Nex. When he managed to sleep, it wasn’t for long, as he woke up at the sounds of the others swapping for the last watch before dawn.
Knowing that sleep wouldn’t come, because he didn’t want to face anymore nightmares nor that sweltering, sticky heat inside that tent, Nar gave up on sleep altogether. His inventory was phenomenal at cleaning whatever went into it, though Nar wasn’t entirely sure what happened to all the dirt caked into his jungle suit, but it didn’t patch the holes ruptured through the material, so he was forced to pull out a third one.
He would have to sit down with Leta to learn from her expert needlework, but for now, he had more pressing matters.
“Can’t sleep?” Jul asked him, as he quietly exited the tent.
She didn’t seem surprised, and given that the quam spent her watches stretching her [Hearing] in order to learn to sense the jungle, Nar had no doubts that Jul had heard each and every of his sighs. Which would also explain the worry oozing from her big, green-blue compound eyes.
“Yeah…” Nar said. However, he hadn’t come out to talk about it, he had something much more useful in mind. And so, he turned to Sej. “How far can you cover for me, if I go outside to train?”
“You want to go out there?” Lim asked, his eyes going wide.
Mul and Tun simply stared at him, both of their expressions masking the inner workings of their minds.
Nar nodded. “Is that okay?”
“I guess it is for you,” Sej said, eyeing him. “Is 300-feet enough? Beyond that, I can’t guarantee total coverage, and go south. There’s nothing there.”
“That’s enough,” Nar said. “And thank you, I’ll keep it quiet.”
“Quiet, eh?” Sej said, sizing him with her yellow eyes. “Fair enough. We’re just guides, so if you think your party leader would be okay with it, go ahead.”
Nar turned his gaze to Tun, who at last betrayed some emotion.
“Me?” the big morsvar asked, a ripple of surprise running down his spikes.
“You and Gad are third in command,” Nar said, smiling at the big tank.
“I’d say so are you, despite your efforts to the contrary,” Tun said, smirking back. “So do whatever you want.”
“Fair enough, I guess,” Nar said, sighing.
However, before he could take a step, Sej nodded towards Jul. “Take her with you. She’s dying to go anyways, and she could use the practice of sensing in the rain.”
Nar eyed the quam.
“Yes! Can I go with you? Please?” she practically begged, leaping top her feet.
Was she worried? Nar wondered. Well, I guess it makes sense… Though I did make sure to be within the safety zone.
“If you want too… You don’t have to, though…”
“I want to!” she said, defiance beaming from her gaze.
“Alright! Alright!” Nar said, smiling back at the short, green haired girl.
A few moments later, they waded into the soft, squelching mud, and heads bowed by the weight of the downpour, Nar allowed Jul to led them somewhere where they could both meet their own training needs.
“It’s really loud out here!” Nar said, shouting to be heard.
“Yes! If you don’t go too wild, no one’s going to wake up!” Jul replied. “You want to train your [Aura Blade], right?”
“How do you know?” Nar asked, frowning.
“I was watching you during the tygalos fight. You look very annoyed every time you cut more branches above us!” Jul said, shooting a sly grin back at him.
“Ugh.”
Trust her to always know, he thought shaking his head.
“How about here?” Jul asked, a while later. “I can sit there, away from the rain, and you can practice against that big trunk over there.”
“Looks perfect,” Nar said, and he resisted the urge of asking her if she was sure about being out there in lukewarm downpour.
It’s probably her way of checking up on me, I guess, he decided. Right, let’s get to it before we run out of night.
He pulled out his sword and, holding it in front of him with both hands, beheld the weapon in his black and gray [Dark Vision]. Like that, the sword appeared before him as a simple, thick line of white, an edge, much like his [Aura Blade] was.
Motionless, he considered what he had been mulling while he had been unable to sleep.
Aura gathering, intent, release, and then control the edge until it either reaches the target or I let go of it, he thought. And the last part requires that I keep an almost separate part of my mind attached to the edges control…
That last part remained a mystery to him. The master had taught him and helped him practice the skill until it had become almost second nature to Nar, but the damn had infuriatingly refused to elaborate further on that “separate” part of him that seemed to fly out with the edge of aura.
“Figure it out yourself,” the master said. “When you do, we’ll talk about it.”
Shouldn’t it be the other way around? He thought, sighing. But he hadn’t gotten much more out of the man since, nor had he insisted much, really.
He sighed, and lowered into stance.
The obvious place to start with is the release, I guess, Nar thought. Somehow, I need to add a “release intent” in there, in order to prevent the blade from leaving the sword the way I want it too. But how in the Pile do I do that?
He raised his blade, and with a small [Aura Blades] of 10 aura points, swung in the darkness. As expected, the effect of the skills was much less dramatic than usual, and though it lit up the night with a sudden bright flash, a million droplets of water glimmering like the precious gemstones he had seen in Jasphaer’s cartoons, it evaporated before even reaching the tree trunk a few steps from him.
As expected, even with less aura, it just spread alongside the path of the swing, Nar thought, his [Dark Vision] now turned off. And so, he gathered his intent. I want a five-feet long blade.
And he swung again.
“Ugh,” he muttered, as the [Aura Blade] behaved exactly as before.
More than just “intent” then, he decided. How about if I try to control the blade as I cut? I can control the [Aura Blade] itself, so maybe I can control it from the exact moment it leaves the sword?
He grimaced. That was split-moment between two seconds… Even with [NPC] was his brain fast enough to capture that moment?
The answer turned out to be a resounding no, and not even using [Aura Quickening] helped. He let his left hand go off the sword, and paced the mud. Jul looked as she had from the moment she had plopped herself atop the dryish rock, having made sure to kill anything sheltering atop it. As Sej had told them, Nar had indeed spotted plenty of creepy crawlies seeking higher ground to avoid the mud flood covering the jungle floor, though it was proving surprisingly adept at absorbing all of that rain.
Wonder where it goes… he thought, then he shook his head. Like Jul, he needed to focus. Dawn would be upon them soon, and already in the distance, he caught the glimmer of the first colorful lights returning to the jungle.
Can’t control it as it leaves, but I still think that intent is the right way… Or could it just be a matter of control? He wondered, gazing down as his blade lit up once more. What if I try to control the aura inside the sword, the one I allocate to the skill, before I even use the skill?
He blinked at the thought in the glimmering rain. Was such a thing even possible? It would be as though both him and the System were controlling the same skill…
But then again, isn’t that what Cen does with her incomplete [Scattering Drops] and [Orb of Erasure]? He thought, recalling what the caster had told him. And for a moment, he stared at his glowing sword, his heart racing with possibility of being correct. Let’s… Try it?
He wished for another ten points of aura to enter the sword, the System holding onto them in order to power the skill, but he reached into the blade and took hold of that aura.
Oh? He thought, frowning down the length of the glowing sword. That was a lot easier than I thought… Alright, how about this th…
And the next thing he knew he was dropping sideways into the mud, his [Aura Blade] going awry and dissipating into the rain.
“Nar!”
Hurried footsteps rushed towards him, and he raised a hand to let Jul know that he was alright.
“I’m-I’m okay!” he said, as four, gentle hands lifted him up from the mud.
“What happened?” she asked him, holding him up with her [Strength] as he found his footing again.
“I have… No idea,” Nar thought, passing a hand over his face, to clear away the mud clinging to him.
The rain quickly scoured the rest of the mud from his body, as he pulled together on the disjointed fragments of his recollection of what he just happened.
The skill had triggered as it usually did, and as expected, that “separate” part of himself had formed in order to take control of the edge of bright aura. However, that formation had been much more abrupt that he had expected, shattering his focus. In fact, it was a thought he had been sucked into the weapon itself, then flung outwards with the skill as he swung the blade, and it had been that abrupt shock of reality twisting and shifting around him that he sent him tumbling down into the mud.
“Nar?” Jul asked again, concern evident in the fact that she hadn’t let go of him.
“I’m alright,” Nar told her, his gaze distant as he continued to examine what had just happened. “Let me try again… Uh, I might fall again though.”
“Alright, I’ll stay nearby,” Jul said, as she stepped away to a safe distance, but close enough to reach him quickly.
As before, Nar readied the skill, held on to the aura, and steeling himself, called upon it.
Reality twisted once more, but prepared for it, he was at least able to realize what had gotten wrong as he dropped towards the mud again.
That “separate” part of me was shattered! He realized, as Jul’s arms closed around him to keep him from diving into the mud flood at his feet again. And what was pulled instead was… Me? The real me?
Jul didn’t say anything as he straightened himself up to try again, and once he made sure she was at a safe distance, he tried again, and as she caught him, he met the same result and the same conclusion.
“Nar?” Jul asked, ever patient as this time, he remained within her arms, distracted by the reality dawning with him, and which mirrored the arrival of dawn within the jungle. “Did you figure something out?”
“Yeah,” he whispered, as colors bloomed all around them, in neon splashes of greens, reds, blues and one particularly massive ivy of violet color, which grew upwards and wound itself around the tree trunk that Nar had been using as a target, and which he never even reached.
“And?” she prodded gently.
“And I think I need another me,” he breathed.
“A… What?” Jul whispered, a half-frown of concern forming. “What do you mean?”
Just like when he had called upon the skill against the illatrian, and for a moment he had felt as though there were two Nars, one being himself, and the other being fully in control of the edge of aura and which set out to fly with the skill itself, now, Nar realized that perhaps that was what was called in order to overcome the flaw of the skill in its current form. He needed to master that separation, that separate intent that controlled the edge of aura, and develop it further into something else…
He had remained skeptical of the “separate” Nar idea, thinking instead that like Cen, who was still struggling to develop the enlightenment she’d received in engineering into a defensive skill, he just needed to train his mind to better handle two separate tasks at the same time… Cen needed to handle multiple tasks, it seemed, relying on her Mind attributes in order to do so. But Nar had thought his challenge to be much simpler, requiring him to handle only two tasks.
However, how complex was the task of shaping an edge of aura mid-swing, in an infinite variety of situations that demanded that he account for an infinite variety of variables?
From swing speed, to distance, to the type of swing, to the goal of his attack, to the enemy characteristics and moves, to the obstacles in his way and around him, to all the combat variables, there was just too much to consider… Controlling his [Aura Blade] properly was far from just a simple task!
What he was doing now was a simple task. All he had to do was make sure he held the edge of aura in shape, deciding when to let go of it. But this was a much more in-depth form of control that he needed to now achieve.
Just as he considered all of the variables automatically when fighting, he needed not to control a static skill, but a skill that was just as variable as his fights were! He could try to achieve all of that with the power of his mind, perhaps, but he was not Cen, and the Master of Blades had led him towards intent from the very beginning, not attributes of the Mind… Which led him to the conclusion that yes, perhaps he indeed needed a “separate” Nar to control his [Aura Blade] in order to control its shape, and perhaps even its flight trajectory beyond that.
He needed a second brain, and given that wasn’t possible, he needed something to control that separate intent… He needed a second will somehow, and thus, a second Nar. But did that truly make sense?
“Nar?” Jul asked again.
He shook his head.
“Sorry, I think I’m onto something. Maybe…” he told her, stepping away from her hold. “But right now, it’s not making much sense even to myself.”
“Right…” the quam said, her confusion evident.
Not a split in the mind, but a true separate part of myself that controls the [Aura Blade] from the very beginning? Nar thought, soaked as he stared up as the violet ivy gained in color, from the very top of the massive tree trunk, and all the way down to where the tree’s roots were buried deeply into the jungle’s dark soil. Crystal, am I going crazy?
And yet, he couldn’t deny the sensation within his core that he was headed in the right direction, nor the promises of another tremendous leap in his capabilities if he truly managed to achieve such an insanity.
Comments
Lucas Onderwater
Maybe... 👀
Lucas Onderwater
I'm glad that you're enjoying it Unsheathed!!
Malcolm Haynes
Interesting idea. A duality. Grief and hope opposing affinities.
Pierre-jean Samaran
Thanks for the chapter !
Mojr
Nar always felt as if his aura was alive. Maybe it will be now
Unsheathed
Whats with this arc and me wanting more. It's too much for me
Pararably
I wonder if he could develop dual affinity’s through this method? Perhaps a way to have his grief affinity and maybe a savior affinity at the same time? Idk but I’m excited to see what happens. Tftc!
