Calyn had walked this hallway between the rooms on the fifth floor of the airship several times over the past cycle. However, it had never felt so long as it did today. She had been brought up in a clan of body enhancers. Sparring sessions could get extremely brutal. Blood and broken bones weren't an aberration on the training field but rather a commonplace part of it. Far from causing them to stop, those of the Sydrak clan were expected to go on fighting through the pain. Your enemies will not stop when you want them to stop, the cold elders who oversaw their training would always quote this whenever someone was hurt badly and wished to end the fight. Unless the injury was life-threatening, or held the possibility of permanently crippling the injured party, then you were expected to push through the pain and keep fighting for another half an hour or more, depending on how sadistic your instructor was that day. This was the kind of training she'd been subjected to all her life and Caly

He was suffocating.Breathing is one of those things that people rarely give any thought to ninety percent of the time. And even in those few instances where it did rise to conscious awareness, people rarely gave thought to the processes that made it happen. Greg had, unfortunately, put himself in a situation where he was forced to think about that exact process. Ironically, with his skin having turned almost transparent, and his body rendered immobile, Greg hadn't noticed that his chest was no longer rising and falling as it should. Greg's attempts to make his skin impervious had essentially created a hard and immovable shell around his ribcage. He hadn't fully inhaled or exhaled at the time, so Greg was caught in a limbo of having some air in his lungs, but not enough. And even what little air he had, was quickly getting used up by his body.Even worse than his skin being a shell that wouldn't allow his ribs to expand beyond a certain point, was the fact that those very ribs were at

Greg called on his mana, directing it all into his skin. He didn't have any spells for softening stone, but he wasn't worried about that. All his focus was on infusing the mana with the will to turn his now diamond skin, soft and pliable, and capable of being quickly affected by the counter-petrification potion. Luckily for Greg, he didn't have to dig deep to find the will. Right then, everything within him wished for his skin to once again revert to normal and the mana carried this intent as it infused his diamond skin. This plus the stonebreaker's tonic made it so that Greg found himself on his knees, palms on the floor before him as he gasped for sweet air! "Get up," Olivia instructed after about three or so minutes had passed. She had given him time to get his breathing back under control and push through the worst of the lightheadedness. Greg, however, couldn't help but look up at her incredulously. Having trained under her for years now, this wasn't the first time Greg had b

Olivia's words hit Greg like a ton of bricks as he realized that he'd fallen into a boxed mode of thinking. The possibilities had always been there before him, but because she'd only ever taken the form of a human body, he'd baselessly come to assume that this was all she could do. It was a bitter lesson in underestimating one's opponent. Had she been his enemy, Greg would have been at her mercy, his life in her hands. Bitter a pill as it was to swallow, it was a lesson best learned here in training than out on the battlefield. Greg's doubts, however, were answered. It wasn't that she'd been holding back some of her strength, instead, she'd just used her ability to manipulate mana to compound the force behind her attack. "It's staggeringly mana expensive," Olivia continued with a slight grimace. "In my normal body, I can fight you for hours on end. If I maintained this transformation continuously, however, I'd only manage about five minutes of fighting. I can stretch out the time by

In the magic world, two individuals at the same tier were largely considered to be equals. The one with greater combat power would hold greater say in some matters, but they wouldn't be able to command as much authority over others in the same tier as those in lower tiers. Nevertheless, the longer that they'd worked together, the more Reina had started regarding his teacher like she was his senior, even though they were both in the third tier. The irony was that it was appropriate. His teacher had been a seventh-tier mage before she was betrayed by her friends. The depth of knowledge that his teacher brought to bear in their cooperation must have left quite a mark on Reina. Otherwise, Greg had no way of explaining the deep respect in her eyes anytime Reina interacted with healer Alena. Other than mana infusions with his teacher, there was an hour of combat training with Olivia, and Calyn from time to time. Greg couldn't help the lascivious smile that crossed his lips as he thought of