Private simulation, Aron’s personal training field.
Aron had been spending his time since the inaugural council meeting in his own personal simulation instance, handling his work and practicing his mana usage by fighting with his AIs. Instead of relying solely on Nova as his sparring partner, he had given the rest of the higher AIs the same mana knowledge he had. As a result, he was growing by leaps and bounds as he fought “people” who, due to the difference in their self-tailored code structure, approached fights in a very different manner compared to Nova. Their usage of his runes gave him many different inspirations on how to use his own.
Currently, he was standing alone in the middle of an empty field, his eyes glowing gold as he attempted to track the flow of mana around him to catch anything out of the ordinary. He was obviously in the middle of a fight with someone.
It wasn’t very long before the AI he was currently sparring with was revealed. No matter how vigilantly he was scanning, he had failed to catch her and the look of focus on his face changed to one of defeat. Nyx had materialized behind him and had a knife to his throat.
[Still want to brag?] Nyx asked with a smile on her face. It was her third consecutive win since Aron began sparring with her.
“I still don’t understand how you can manage to escape detection. No matter how sensitive to mana I am... hell, even if I push enough mana into my eyes to outright see the mana in my surroundings itself, I just can’t pin you down,” Aron said, raising his hands in defeat. If he continued to hold them at his sides, he knew that Nyx wouldn’t hesitate to complete her assassination strike against him. Silence, to her, meant that the fight was still ongoing; it was a trait she had consciously focused on as she didn’t want to ever be tricked by a false surrender of one of her opponents, one day. Thus, making things as clear as possible prevented that, which was perhaps something that could be considered strange, given her role as the mistress of shadows and secrets.
[You’ll just have to figure it out for yourself,] Nyx giggled.
[Any time any of us use something to defeat you, you ask how we did it and come up with a way to do it yourself and counter it. We’re all worried that that’ll foster a sense of dependency in you, which is a very unhealthy mindset. I’m sure that, if you meet people in the future that use different styles of magic, you’ll be in a bad situation when you come up against the unknown. So you have to train the ability to figure out your opponents’ cards so you can deal with things even if you don’t quite grasp everything about what’s happening to you.] Athena added from the side.
Aron, who was used to a more taciturn Athena, was surprised by the long string of words from her. Though, when he took a moment to consider it, it was actually quite normal for her, in her role as a trainer, to lecture her students and sparring partners. The only thing out of the ordinary is that she had given him a long explanation without littering it with profanity and other insults. Then he came to another realization: the fight had resumed!
And not only had the fight resumed, but he was now facing two of his top AI confidants simultaneously. Athena had even used that brief question and answer session as lead time for her to set up her attacks and traps!
He immediately cast a flight rune and pumped it full of mana, sending him flying up fifty kilometers into the sky in roughly a tenth of a second. His abrupt ascent was so fast that even as enhanced as he was, he was still having difficulty maintaining his consciousness until he stopped, hovering in mid-air.
Aron began flying in a random pattern as he searched for Athena. She was nearly as difficult to spot when she focused on hiding as Nyx was, the tricky minx. Although Nyx was a truly difficult opponent to defend himself against, Athena was perhaps the most frightening out of all his sparring partners. She was the AI who had been purpose built from the beginning to be a wartime commander of men, and she was equally skilled at planning wars as she was at preventing them. And one of the most versatile tools in her arsenal was the classic tactic of ambushing unprepared foes, making her and runes a natural match made in heaven.
She always had a bigger plan in mind, and as the limiters on today’s sparring session had been completely removed, Aron felt cold sweat flowing down his back like a river pouring down the face of a glacier. Perhaps, he considered, he had completely fucked up. That realization was so strong that he actually found himself daydreaming about the record scratching meme.
“It was at this moment that I realized I had truly fucked up,” he murmured under his breath, continuing his search for Athena. His shield rune was rapidly burning through the mana he had pushed into it, a limitation he’d set to prevent making training of any kind pointless as he activated his golden finger cheat and became completely invincible. After all, with the equivalent of an entire universe’s mana resources, he could easily make a mockery of any attack.
He soon met Athena, or rather, Athena’s ambush to be more precise, as his random movements were met with hidden explosive rune after explosive rune. It appeared he was sprinting through a minefield now, and he attempted to stop, but....
Alas, it was too late.
He began being bounced from rune to rune, each of them set to explode upon his approach to them. Thus, with no room to escape, his shield was pushed to its limits and began cracking.
Then, with one mighty cracking sound, his shield finally gave up in the face of the explosions and a millimeter-wide gash exposed him to the next fierce explosion.
He could take at least a little bit of condolence, though, in that he had been flash fried so quickly that he didn’t feel a thing.
