“Don’t you even start with that!” she snapped, wagging a finger in my face. “I’ll move more logs than you would have anyway, and it won’t even be hard.” Without waiting for a response, she spun and walked away into the living room, pausing at the far door. “C’mon, Lia! We’ve got some ‘training’ to do!” Clearly satisfied with herself, she walked out onto the deck and disappeared.
“I’m sure she probably believes you, at least a little bit,” Lia reassured me as she stood to follow her rambunctious student. “You’re pretty hard to explain otherwise.”
“Honestly, I should’ve expected that. Out of all of the possible responses to my story, hers is probably the most normal.” I stood alongside Lia and put a hand on her shoulder. “You and your parents are the weird ones here, being so accepting and all.”
“Guess you’re glad you met me then, huh?” she asked, grinning up at me.
I planted a kiss on her forehead. “I am, indeed.” I motioned to the door with a tip of my head. “You better get going before she decides to knock the whole forest down herself.”
Lia giggled and gave me a small nod, then dashed off through the living room, leaving me alone to clean up our dishes. I smiled after her, watching her progress through my Detection as she sprinted through the forest to catch up with Marin. The grin stayed on my face as I stacked up our plates and stashed away the remainder of our bread and meat. Everything I have now is because I met her, I thought to myself. I would have burned away into the void by now if I were by myself. Although my sword was stashed away with my armor, my hand moved to where it would sit on my hip through instinct, and I could feel the gold-banded pommel beneath my fingers. It’s time.
The remaining work on our construction projects progressed without interruption. My estimate for the completion of my forge proved to be spot-on; after a particularly efficient afternoon of bricklaying on the chimney, it only took a few hours the following day to construct the open-air stall around the furnace using the logs from our new supply. I built a workbench with the emberwood scraps, complete with a pegboard with multiple empty spaces for tools that I had yet to buy or craft. Marin and Lia returned soon after for lunch, and when we had finished, I joined them at the build site in the northern forest.
Even though I had seen the clearing grow throughout the work process via Detection, it was still an impressive sight to behold with my own eyes. What had once been a small grove surrounded by densely packed trees was now a massive field of upturned dirt with a towering stack of logs at one edge. Judging by the average height of the emberwood trees around the clearing’s edge, the space was at least a hundred yards across and nearly twice as long. While it was more than large enough to suit our needs, the ground was loose and uneven from the copious root systems that had been recently removed, which left it unsuited for any intense physical activity.
“Are you sure you don’t want any help?” Lia asked me as I took a meditative stance at the edge of the clearing. “You don’t have to do the entire thing in one go by yourself.”
“Thanks, Lia, but I’m fine. I can handle it.” In truth, I had my doubts about the task set before me; while the concept of leveling a foundation had been successfully proven when we built our house, the field was multiple orders of magnitude larger than anything I had attempted to suffuse with mana before. However, as Lia had said, there was no particular reason the entire arena had to be leveled at once apart from my own stubborn ambitions, and the lack of consequences for failing the task helped to bolster my confidence.
After a few minutes of quiet meditation, I reached out with a gentle wave of energy to cover the surface of the clearing before me. Once my mental mapping was complete, I pulled the energy back a half-dozen yards from the treeline into a stadium shape, then began to suffuse the dirt below it. Mana crashed out from my core like a burst dam to fill every cubic inch of space before me, and I felt a significant flagging of my energy reserves for the first time since our incident at the Mountain Gate. I continued to push the mana deeper into the earth, increasing my Combat Acceleration enhancement in tandem with the immense amount of information flowing into my brain.
I felt my lungs straining as I fought to maintain my concentration on the vast sea of mana before me. My advancing wall of energy halted when it reached nearly ten feet down; our initial plans, drawn up in my sketchbook back on our living room table, had called for twelve feet, but the immense pressure I felt in my head told me that I would pass out from exertion long before I reached the mark. Too focused to find the Shatter rune on my ring, I spoke the command with a final gasp.
My mind immediately went black as the mana activated and disappeared, and I blinked in and out of consciousness multiple times in quick succession. I felt a powerful tremor beneath my legs, followed by the thud of my head connecting with the ground as I
