Chapter 28 : Mentor

BAM! CRACK!!

"AAARRRGGHHH!!!!"

Thud. "Stand up, Rammy."

Pant... Pant... Fuck. Fuck!

"Do not waste my time! Stand up!"

I'm losing my fucking mind! I glared up at the massive man. Zerav was standing completely unbothered, casually checking the sand falling in a glass hourglass he had set on the grass.

"It has been five days, Rammy. You have been dying for five days straight! You need to make some fucking progress!" Zerav roared, his voice shaking the grass. "Stand up!"

I forced my body off the ground. Even though the domain's magic ensured my flesh and bones were completely fresh, the accumulated, agonizing phantom pain was taking a massive toll on my sanity.

I planted my feet and dropped firmly into my stance.

Think. Think, Ramond. I have to counter it just once.

My eyes locked onto Zerav's massive frame. I stopped looking at his hands and started looking at his biomechanics.

Every time he initiated the spatial crush, his setup was identical. He shifted his body weight forward. He dragged his right foot back by exactly three inches. Then, he raised his left arm, coiled the heavy muscles of his right arm tight against his waist, and kept his center of gravity entirely loaded onto his leading left leg.

Wait. To actually execute the attack and crack the space, he had to stomp the ground with his right foot. Which meant he had to aggressively pivot his entire body weight.

My eyes widened. Don’t tell me.

Before I could adjust my footing, he vanished.

He materialized directly in front of me. He planted his left foot as an anchor, raised his right leg, and violently threw his massive weight into the strike.

BAM!

The space cracked. He raised his right hand to grab the fractured air.

I see the pivot!

CRACK!!!!!

"GRRRRRRR!!" I ground my teeth together as my anatomy was pulverized yet again. I slumped into the dirt, waiting for the agonizing cellular regeneration to finish.

"Again! Stand up!" He turned and walked back to his starting mark.

As my torn muscles stitched back together, a subtle, tired smirk pulled at the corner of my mouth. I understand the mechanics now.

When the healing finished, I stood up. But this time, I changed my footing to mirrored him. I dropped my weight perfectly into the exact Voidmeister stance he was using.

"Heh. Good." Zerav smirked, noting the adjustment. He settled into his own stance. "Let’s see it then, Rammy."

I coiled my balance tightly onto my front leg. The exact millisecond Zerav’s shoulder twitched to raise his left hand, I exploded forward.

I closed the gap instantly. I raised my right boot, loaded every ounce of physical kinetic force I possessed into my leg, and drove it downward.

BAM!!! BAM!!

We stomped the earth at the exact same fraction of a second.

The physical space between us violently buckled from both sides. An invisible, catastrophic kinetic pressure squeezed the dead center of the air between our bodies.

CRACK!!! BOOOMM!!!

The compressed space violently detonated. The reality between us shattered like a pane of glass, releasing a massive shockwave that launched both of our heavy bodies flying backward through the air.

I hit the grass, sliding to a halt as a thick cloud of dust lingered over the battlefield.

"Great work, Rammy."

The deep, rumbling voice echoed through the smoke. Zerav casually strolled through the settling dust, brushing off his dark trousers. "You successfully countered it."

"I honestly didn’t expect that to work," I grunted, pushing myself up and rolling the tension out of my shoulders.

"The Voidmeister discipline does not rely on mana. Nor does it use aura," he stated, crossing his massive arms. "It requires pure technique, and perfect channeling."

I frowned, dusting off my boots. "Channeling?"

He smirked. "Tell me. How do mana and aura fundamentally function?"

"Mana is ambient energy. A mage pulls it from the environment and processes it through their core," I recited. "Aura is internal. It's life energy that a warrior naturally produces and pushes outward through their core."

"Correct. And what do you know about the Voidmeister technique?"

"I’m not entirely sure..." I scratched my jaw, thinking back to the mechanics of the stance. "It has something to do with leverage and weight distribution?"

He chuckled. "From a purely technical standpoint, you are very close. But what about the essential philosophy of the power?"

"It absorbs energy? And it relies on 'channeling'?" I sighed, closing my eyes in frustration. "I don’t know, Zerav. Nobody ever taught me the theory."

"True. You only learned by mimicking the physical shapes of my stances, didn't you?"

I looked at him. The harsh, militant glare had softened slightly.

"Let me explain," he said quietly, "with a simple demonstration."

Zerav raised his index finger, casually tracing a glowing rune in the empty air. A split second later, a condensed sphere of violently swirling black wind hovered in front of his chest.

"Watch closely," he ordered. "Watch how the energy actually moves."

He dropped his weight into his combat stance. The moment he raised his open left palm, the wind orb was sucked into his hand like a vacuum. My eyes tracked the flow of the magic that glow from his body. The concentrated energy traveled rapidly down his arm, pooling and hovering directly inside his center core.

Then, he moved. He raised his right leg, violently shifting his entire body weight to pivot. The sphere of dark energy instantly drained from his core, flowing down his heavy thigh and pooling into his boot.

BAM!! CRACK!!

My eyes went wide. The physical space directly beneath his boot violently cracked. But unlike the massive, widespread shatter from before, this fracture was pitch-black, incredibly narrow, and hyper-focused. With a sharp, grinding twist of his heel, he shattered the localized space into dust.

"Do you understand the mechanics now?" he asked, glancing back at me.

"Are you actually absorbing the physical air and controlling it?" I frowned, piecing the logic together. "Is that why I felt suffocated and crushed by atmospheric pressure when I was trapped inside your spatial crush?"

He smirked. "Almost correct. But pay attention to the scale. As you just saw, when I focused on absorbing my own wind orb, the spatial fracture was narrow and tightly controlled."

He turned to face me fully, crossing his massive arms. "That orb was my own Condensed Mana. My attacks against you, however, was fueled by the environment itself. Raw, natural energy is infinitely more volatile, heavy, and powerful than standard condensed mana."

I shook my head, my frown deepening. "But when I mirrored your stance a minute ago… I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel any energy absorbing into my body."

"That is because a Voidmeister does not 'absorb' energy to keep it. We simply channel it," he explained, slowly pacing across the pulverized grass. " Every specific Voidmeister stance serves a different biomechanical purpose. Take your usual stance, for example. Your balance is weighted perfectly in the center. So, when you open your left palm to catch an attack, you absorb the enemy's condensed mana directly into your core, compress it, and launch it right back out. That kinetic compression is why the output is multiplied."

He stopped pacing and tapped his heavy thigh. "But when you radically shift your balance—like dropping your weight entirely into your leg—your core acts as a frictionless bypass tunnel. It channels the energy without attempting to process or compress it, instantly dumping the raw kinetic power directly into your physical strike."

He looked toward me, "As why you didn't feel the flow of natural energy inside your body, it simply because your energy tunnel already opened. Even you already capable execute Voidmeister stance since you were kid, that's why when you mimic my stance correctly, you able to execute Spatial Crush naturally."

I crossed my arms, thinking it through. "Wait. If natural energy is so much stronger than mana, why not just stay in the center stance? If I absorbed natural energy and compressed it in my core, the damage output would be massive."

Zerav stopped. He looked at me for a long moment. "I heard you already tried to absorb a dragon’s fire, didn't you? Tell me... what were the physical consequences?"

I froze. A phantom ache throbbed deep in my body. "It ruined me. It melted my skin and tore my muscles apart from the inside out."

He offered a grim, knowing smile. "Dragons do not use mana to cast their breath, Rammy. They expel pure, unrefined natural energy: raw primordial fire. That is why the physical toll on your body was so catastrophic. You stayed in your center stance. You accidentally tried to process and compress raw natural energy inside your core instead of just channeling it out."

His smile completely vanished.

"Honestly? You are incredibly lucky. The only reason that primordial energy didn't instantly detonate and turn you into ash... is simply because your core is completely empty."

I looked down at my boots. A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the spatial domain.

"Then what about Clarice?" I asked, glancing up at him. "I saw in your memory that she could control the dark using the Voidmeister technique."

Zerav spun around, presenting his massive back to me. "Light is just another form of natural energy. But it behaves differently than the other elemental energies. To exploit light energy, you cannot channel it through your physical core..."

He turned back around, tapping his index finger against his temple. "...you must channel it through your mind. That is why one of the Voidmeister’s methods is chanting. The words act as a mental trigger, allowing you to either exploit light energy or violently strip the ambient light away from a target."

"It sounds quite magical," I muttered.

Zerav shook his head. "No. It is the manipulation of pure natural energy. You copied her technique perfectly, remember?"

I clenched my fists, the horrifying memory of my own body moving against my will flashing in my mind. "Yeah."

"When you began to chant, that was the exact moment the ambient light energy was stripped from the area, leaving your target's senses completely trapped inside a sensory-deprivation darkness."

I took a deep, shaky breath. "I understand now. Especially the mechanics of the Voidmeister technique."

"Good." Zerav looked at me, a dark smirk pulling at his scarred lips. "Now, are you ready for the second phase?"