But not all her training was sparring, and right now this was a solo exercise that she was not yet starting. Whenever she felt an opening she went passive and peered inside deeper, as she was doing now.
The Essence stuck to her Core, but squeeze it like a sponge and some of it would become liquid and she could direct it where she wanted with difficulty. The mechanism for the movement wasn’t physical, but rather an aspect of her Core…which couldn’t be measured by technology. Strovok said he could see inside her, but she couldn’t see into him…though she was beginning to naturally gain the ability to look inside herself.
Kara didn’t know how she was improving, rather fumbling around in the dark for the most part, but her ability to move Essence around without having to rely on her Siphon was improving…and while Hard Light was an important ability to learn, it was for melee combat, and if she was going to fight other Essence users alongside Strovok, she needed to let him handle the melee as she assisted him with ranged attacks.
But to shoot ranged Essence meant it had to leave contact with your Core…unless you used long chains or whips to connect to whatever you had crafted. That wouldn’t work for firing blasts, so she had to take the loosened Essence within her and change its form into something that would hold up beyond her body long enough to hit the target drones.
She wasn’t even trying to work on crafting it into certain abilities today. She just wanted to work on her launch mechanism, cadence, and accuracy. The trouble was, she could launch Essence from any part of her body with or without a physical trigger. Looking inward now, she could create many effects pulling from her center, but in combat she wouldn’t get many breaks to do so, and that meant she had to react fast…and that meant adding a physical action to help her mind automatically reach into her Core for a well-practiced action that she could do instinctively rather than using large amounts of mental focus.
Final Spark had her focusing from her abdomen, but she needed to shoot more than what was just in front of her, so her hands were the natural choice…with Kara pulling Essence out of her arms and having the rest of it in her body flow to replace the drain and even out as the oversurge in her palms was focused into two of her fingers clasped together like a gun muzzle.
Kara pointed at one of the targets and shot a stream of Essence into it at a range of 10 meters, filling it up to saturation only to have it fly off with its valuable cargo as another drifted up from below to take its place.
Her left hand tilted down and to the side, firing another stream into another, and she repeated one arm after another until her body’s Essence level dropped below half…then she opened her Siphon and began replacing it while using it, firing one stream after another with faster and faster succession as the targets raced to keep up with her.
It was hard for her to maintain her focus, for the Essence was sticky and didn’t want to flow without a lot of pushing on her part. Too little and it wouldn’t condense into a stream, just splatting off her fingers like a misfire, but each day she worked on this it loosened up a little bit more, though not much. Kara knew she had to grind this type of training, but it still seemed to be moving too slow for what she was expecting.
When Kara finally ran out of targets, with them all floating off across the landscape in a scattered convoy to the Elcee outpost miles away, she dropped to the ground and felt her bare feet sink into the wet soil, for a rainstorm had passed through a few hours ago, with another one approaching from the ‘south.’
She wore spandex short shorts and a training bra, which was her normal attire nowadays. The Elcee kept any potential threats away from her training area, so she didn’t need armor, and when she wasn’t sleeping she was training, so no other clothes than training clothes were needed, except she did have a pile of them with tears, sweat, and blood stains on them. She didn’t want to use her armor except as a last resort, and Strovok had suggested she didn’t, because she needed to learn to fight and protect herself using Essence alone.
It didn’t always work out so well, so her wardrobe was being refurbished as often as the target drones, but right now what she wore was intact, though sweaty. Using Essence took a toll on the body, and Kara was always dripping at the end of a long workout.
It was getting better though, for somehow she was developing an immunity to some of it. Wherever the Essence flowed freely there was little strain…but where it was sticky her body had to work hard to move it, even though it wasn’t her body doing it.
Kara couldn’t explain it to herself, she just had to wing it and hope to figure stuff out as she went along…which was different than having the Vorch’nas, for it came with instructions and knowledge. Her Essence abilities had no such luxury, and even with the Responders and Strovok to help, there was a lot she was having to clumsily figure out by trial and error.
But it wasn’t just her
