Snapping out of his concentration on trying to force the stamina to behave, Deacon lunged forward and drove the blade downward onto the pillar of stone.

  The instant steel met stone, two things happened at once.

  The first was the sensation of the pillar offering almost no resistance at all. The heightened sharpness granted by the rush of stamina via Power Strike

  The blade sank straight down through the top third of the pillar, carving a deep vertical furrow that widened with the force of his downward swing.

  And at that exact same moment, long before Deacon could fully process just how easily his sword had cut cleanly through the stone without having used any mana, overwhelming pain arced across his arms.

  Something in his arms seized all at once, every muscle from fingertips to shoulders began to spasm violently. Veins and muscles bulged violently under his skin began to swell too fast and expansively; his arms trembled, contorting and cramping under the surge of stamina flooding through them.

  For a split second, as the skin of his arms struggled to contain the muscles of his arms in place, he could hear the sound of thousands of pieces of cloth ripping at the same time.

  Then… his arms burst apart in two squelching pops.

  Twin sprays of blood and shredded muscle exploded from his shoulders, splattering across the air and stone around him. The recoil of the sudden burst stole what little strength he had left from his legs.

  And by the time his brain caught up to what just happened, a raw roar of pain ripped out of his throat as his knees hit the ground.

  Echoform Reliquary remained lodged in the nearly split-in-two stone pillar, while Deacon crumpled onto both knees, his chest jerking with each attempt to pull air back into his lungs.

  He gritted his teeth so hard he could feel them crack under the strain, eyelids shutting on instinct as he struggled to keep his head up and try to keep the remaining liters of blood in his body from leaving with the meager amount of blood control he had.

  Across from him, Bjorn stayed silent for several long seconds, listening to the ragged, uneven groans Deacon couldn’t contain and the wet patter of blood dripping onto the grass between them —-forcing himself to stare at the consequences of the choice he and his brother had made three hundred and four years ago.

  “I fucking told Mattias there would be consequences for keeping him in stasis for as long as we did,” Bjorn softly muttered under his breath, unsealing the wards he placed on the training field and rushing to grab a hold of Deacon.

  “I got you,” Bjorn muttered, holding onto him in a kneel with such softness that contrasted their current surroundings.

  Deacon barely registered him through the haze of pain arcing through his body and the sudden loss of 90% of his stamina pool, focusing instead on the instinctive pull of blood inside his chest and forcing it to remain within him.

  With a speed Deacon couldn’t track through his clouded vision, Bjorn pressed his index and middle fingers together, surging them with mana, and struck several pressure points along the wrecked remains of Deacon’s shoulders, pectorals, and shoulder blades.

  As his mana pushed into Deacon’s pressure points, the blood flow to the tattered remains of his shoulders halted.

  To Deacon’s body, Bjorn’s mana registered as a foreign presence the moment it spread into his body, and as a result, those sections of Deacon’s body responded to it on instinct, treating it like an invasive threat.

  The muscles around those areas cinched tight, and the severed pathways clamped down as well. As a result, the exposed arteries and veins constricted hard enough to block their own flow, quarantining the damaged sections around the intruding mana.

  Between Deacon’s instinctual hold on his blood despite his extreme exhaustion and Bjorn’s intervention, blood no longer spilled from the tattered remains of his shoulder.

  No longer feeling the rush of blood trying to leave his body, and finally able to loosen the reins he had on it, Deacon barely managed to lift his eyes toward his uncle. But as he met the concern- and guilt-filled gaze staring back at him, everything became hazy to him.

  His vision tunneled for a brief moment before his eyes rolled to the back of his head and his body slumped forward — felled by blood loss and the abrupt, violent crash of his stamina reserves.

  Bjorn caught his head immediately, supporting him with an arm behind his back and head before slowly lowering him onto the floor.

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  “…I suppose this was bound to happen,” Bjorn murmured, reaching into the Spatial Pouch strapped along his lower back as he stared at Deacon’s shoulders, and how the blood stains around him made it look as though he had wings of blood. “Given how unruly his energies have been since coming out of stasis, and with his lifespan nearing its Tier-1 maximum, then him almost immediately poking at those energies less than a year after gaining his Class… well, all that buildup had no choice but to explode like a shaken bottle of wine.

  “Hopefully, letting it explode like that will make the rest easier to manage,” he muttered to himself as he took out a High Tier-1 Regeneration Potion —one he had purchased precisely because of how volatile it was to learn to manipulate the energies that coursed through their bodies, granted by the System.

  At the academy, cadets were taught to manipulate their mana by stimulating their mana systems with external mana fed through the mana-testing machines. They were forced to push back against the invasive energy using their own. The process was excruciating, and the only relief they were allowed came in the form of heavy doses of pain suppressant they successfully repelled the assault —only for the instructors to repeat the procedure the next day, increasing the difficulty each time. Cadets were only permitted to advance once they could reliably fend off the attacks within the academy’s average parameters and were able to form a magic circle and successfully cast a spell.

  During his time at the academy, he had monitored Deacon’s training closely. And while Deacon wasn’t like those little friends of his —Sam, Esmerelda, and Liam —who had completed their training by the end of the day, Deacon still possessed a fair amount of talent and affinity for mana. By the middle of the third day, he had succeeded and become fully capable of actively manipulating his mana.

  “Hopefully, he shows just as good talent with being able to manipulate his stamina,” Bjorn muttered as he tipped the vial against Deacon’s lips and made sure the potion actually went down his throat rather than spilling uselessly out of his mouth.

  After Deacon had fully drunk the potion, he let out a low exhale through his nose and leaned back on one hand. “… I sure as hope that war you’re fighting up there is well worth it, Matt – worth it enough to leave Deacon in this insect jar of a Tower.”

  By the next morning, Deacon was whole again — arms fully regrown and covered in unblemished skin, bones knitted cleanly as though the previous day’s mess had never happened. The High-Tier Regeneration Potion had done its job, and a full night and a half’s rest managed to top off his stamina pool.

  Now he sat cross-legged on the same patch of grass where his arms had violently come apart less than twenty-four hours prior, wearing his Sovereign Blades track suit with the sleeves pushed up, shoulders relaxed, shins pressed against the still-flattened impression his knees had left yesterday.

  Unfortunately, his Chestpiece of the Barbarian that he was wearing yesterday was in tatters, and his uncle had passed it on to a friend who would try to find him a level 20 set.

  Bjorn sat behind him, both palms pressed firmly against Deacon’s shoulder blades, guiding his own stamina into Deacon’s body, not enough to overwhelm him, but just enough for him to sense what the energy of stamina feels like.

  Both of them had their eyes closed, though Bjorn’s focus stayed calm and focused while Deacon’s remained narrowed on the strange new sensation of actually being able to track the movement of his own stamina in his limbs and torso on such an intrinsic level.

  With each passing quarter hour, Bjorn tested Deacon’s control over his stamina. Sometimes he would seal a part of Deacon’s body, forcing him to reverse the effect by using stamina to bolster and restore that area to normal. Other times, Bjorn required him to flood specific parts of his body with varying amounts of stamina and maintain the flow for similarly varying lengths of time.

  Once Deacon managed to pass all of his tests for two consecutive hours without showing signs of fatigue, Bjorn decided that they should move on to the final step of their Stamina 101 training.

  “Good. Now, try and see if you can put what we practiced into action,” Bjorn said as he severed the connection and stood onto his two feet, absentmindedly brushing aside the many empty Stamina Potion bottles and Stamina Crystal remains nearby before tapping the ground and raising a stone pillar from the ground a foot in front of Deacon.

  Getting to his feet, Deacon took a few seconds to get over his minor surprise of not having to move around to get the blood in his legs to properly circulate after not having moved in nine hours.

  Hidden buffs of stamina manipulation, he surmised as he flexed his fingers before reaching for his dagger on his back sheath. Upon drawing it, Deacon took in a deep breath and held it out in front of him.

  The moment he activated Power Strike

  Deacon told himself. Compared to before, the actively controlled stamina in his body was no longer running rampant when he activated the skill, but it was still sluggish, and trying to use it in a fight was a surefire way to get himself or his team killed.

  Bjorn didn’t say a word, but Deacon could feel his uncle’s attention narrowing onto every twitch of his arm, tracking whether he would be able to properly use the skill or if he would need to intervene to prevent Deacon from blowing himself up again.

  Feeling his stamina firmly under control, Deacon increased the flow into his arm — only to immediately then clamp down on it as it tried to bunch his bicep too quickly, bracing through the growing pressure as he deliberately slowed the buildup.

  When the swelling in his forearm reached a point where it felt like needles were pricking his arm, Deacon stepped forward and swung.

  The dagger carved through the stone pillar in a clean diagonal line, parting the material as easily as if someone had drawn a blade through paper. The surge of stamina cut off immediately the moment the strike was completed, leaving only a lingering sting running from his shoulder to his fingertips.

  Letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding, Deacon lowered the dagger and absently braced his right arm with his left, rubbing his fingers along the sore muscles while he tried to adjust to the hot prickling sensation crawling beneath the skin.

  The cut stone slid apart with a muted scrape, and Bjorn folded his arms as he watched the pieces fall away from each other and settle onto the grass.

  “Now again,” he said as another pillar of stone rose from the ground in front of Deacon.

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