The Demon Lord Is An Angel
Chapter 69: Unlocking Magic

Chapter 69: Unlocking Magic

Kir breathed a sigh of relief when he was assigned to a circle of fighters that did not include Lugh.

"Hey new guy," someone called to Kir as he joined the circle. He turned to see a beastkin woman long, antelope-like horns spiraling up past her helmet. "Start flowing your mana, gotta keep it on for the rest of training or you’re going to lose one of those pretty horns of yours." She tapped her own horn.

Kir assumed she meant circulating his mana. He had started circulating internally even before coming to class, focusing on not letting it escape him. He was still doing so now. "Thank you for the advice," Kir said. "I’m Kir."

"I heard. I’m Ata. I’m seniormost here so I’m in charge of this circle," she gestured vaguely at the rest of the group. "Go on and introduce yourselves."

As the rest of the group introduced themselves, with varying degrees of wariness of him, Kir noticed that all the other groups seemed centered around senior-looking cadets. His tail flicked with curiosity but he stayed quiet, deciding to focus on the task in front of him.

Very quickly, his expectations were blown out of the water.

Most of the cadets didn’t use swords, preferring spears, axes, or maces. The training versions of these were all wood, but some of the cadets used dulled weapons.

The way the cadets sparred, even if it wasn’t entirely serious, made it obvious that if the Olympics had come to Ayther, not one world-class athlete would have been able to keep up with the trainees here.

It wasn’t just the sheer strength and speed they put on display as the cadets began to spar in pairs. Their endurance made it evident that they could spar all day if they had to.

Ata came over and laid a heavy hand on Kir’s shoulder, such that Kir got an eyeful of her thick, black fingernails. She was only taller than him because of her horns. "You and me are going next," she said. "Good to see you know how to flow your mana." She withdrew her hand and stepped into the ring formed by the rest of their group.

Kir followed, his tail flicking with a bit of apprehension, his training sword held in the same two-handed grip as when he’d been doing drills with the other Academy students.

"Weird hold. You any good with that thing?" Ata asked.

"Not really," Kir said. "I’m more practiced with knives and, uh, hand-to-hand."

"Like getting up close, eh?" Ata reached down and picked up some of the sand from a small bag at her feet, scrubbing it across her palms.

"I wouldn’t say I like it," Kir said. "The knives I use are more for conducting spells... and I won’t be using them here." He was mostly grateful that he’d been able to figure out how to stow his knives back in their dimensional sheathes. It involved a bit of pain from mana leakage. Trying to remove one had proven at least twice as painful as putting it in though.

"So, hand to hand then. I’m game," Ata jumped a bit, bouncing as she threw a few punches into the air. It gave Kir a view of her forearms, which he noted had four tattoos for spatial storage, and he noticed one of them was framed within the tattooed outline of a shield.

"I’m still a bit new to how this is supposed to work," Kir said, lowering himself into an open L-shaped stance, his rear foot holding most of his weight as his front foot pointed right at Ata. Automatically, his tail shifted to help his balance as he raised his arms.

She had a similar reaction to his form as Darlae when they’d first trained.

"What kind of stance is that?" she asked.

"It’s what I know," Kir said simply.

Ata floated in like a boxer, jabbing with a feint as she tried to get Kir to strike at her first. When that didn’t happen, she stepped into his reach. He dodged her followup punch and stepped out of his stance, grabbing her by the wrist and pivoting her into a front-flip with her own momentum.

She rotated enough that her horns scraped the ground before landing on her feet, and as she crunched to a stand, she turned and looked at Kir with a bit more respect than before. "Hahah! Almost got me. Let’s pick up the pace-" She started punching at Kir, stepping forward and forcing him to dodge.

Kir tried to minimize his movements, focusing on dodging in ways that let him transition between stances. More than once, he was able to deliver punches and kicks into Ata’s core, but it was like striking iron and he felt like it did more damage to him than her. "Hit me like you mean it!" she challenged him more than once.

After struggling to keep dodging for what felt like an hour, Ata finally got frustrated enough to charge Kir. She moved so fast, instead of dodging and tripping her like he planned, he wound up bracing his arms upward to guard his face. She’d fooled his instincts into thinking she was about to headbutt him, and they wound up with arms locked, hands on each others shoulders.

"Are you holding back on me?" she asked, her teeth bared in what could have been either a smile or grimace as she tried to twist him to the right.

"I swear I’m not," Kir said, trying to out-torque her to the left and remain standing.

He knew he was working on pure muscle, while she had the advantage of mana enhancement. Darlae, when she’d trained him, had given him a solid physical foundation but hadn’t wanted to affect his growth by teaching him mana enhancement, since apparently, it could lead to problems down the line. Now, Kir was regretting slacking on his curiosity when Darlae told him all about people who made themselves too strong to live in normal society or grew too dependent on mana for everything their bodies could do.

At the present moment, however, the only way he was going to stay on his feet was to put everything into his next move.

In a sudden reversal, Kir threw himself into the direction Ata was trying to throw him, building up momentum using her own centripetal force to grant him just enough strength to take her off her feet and onto her back as his feet-

"Shit!" Ata cried out as she landed, her arm sweeping Kir under a leg and taking away just as he was about to land. He fell on his back beside her, stunned as the breath left his lungs from the impact.

He was unable to react when Ata rolled on top of him and mounted his hip, one hand gripping his thoroughly stained shirt as she held her fist at the ready.

"Yield?" she asked.

"I yield," Kir wheezed, painfully aware of the pressure on his tail where it was pinned under his hip.

Around them, some of the students started to clap as Ata turned her fist into a helping hand for Kir, stepping backward as she helped him to his feet. "You’re pretty decent for an Academy kid. But you’re too much in your head. You’ll never unlock your mana enhancement unless you really feel it," she poked him in the chest, right above his heart.

"Unlock?" Kir asked.

"What, no one’s ever pissed you off?" She challenged, before patting him hard on the back.

"Talk about it while you run," one of the more senior knights said as he walked towards the group. "I’ll take over for now," the dwarvish man said.

Ata shrugged and walked with Kir to the edge of the training area. They started running at the same time, and after an initial burst of speed Ata slowed down on her second lap to jog next to Kir.

"Thought you’d be faster," she said, not even winded from her sprint.

"I thought we were going to talk about unlocking or something," Kir said as he tried to moderate his breathing.

"Oh yeah," she chuckled. "Right, so, I thought you were a natural, but you didn’t use any enhancement at all against me, did you?"

"I mean, I was circulating my mana," Kir said.

"That’ll do for defense. Everyone gets that eventually. What I mean is, you didn’t use any offensive mana enhancement," she explained.

"I never really got to that in my training," Kir shrugged. "You said something about being pissed off?"

"Well, yeah. That’s how people who don’t get it some other way normally start with offensive enhancement. You get so pissed or scared that the mana gives you strength when you need it," Ata gestured around at the cadets. "Most everyone here got the shit beat out of them until-" she snapped her fingers "-the magic happened, same as me. You coming in this late is weird, so I thought you were some mage who got his cherry popped and needed to get control of himself."

Her words gave Kir pause. If enhancement magic was tied to emotions...

Suddenly he realized. He’d always been level-headed for the most part. Teenage hormones aside, he had practices and the consciousness to stay thoughtful even during his worst experiences. It now made sense to him why Darlae had spent much of his training with her being annoying. He’d chalked it up to hazing, trying to toughen him up, and had mostly kept his focus until one day they just sort of stopped training together that way.

Now he knew he’d gotten in his own way, and his mastery of magic had suffered for it.

He might have felt mad, if he didn’t find it slightly ironic. His moms often told him he was a good son, and praised him for his intelligence and calm. He had no idea how much of that was from his previous life, but he’d loved the praise. Tried to fulfill that role.

In other words, if he was going to unlock part of his magic, he really would need to learn to cut loose.

Little did he know that in a matter of hours, he’d get his chance.