"Try again." The voice shouted at Rudeus.
He cast another stone wall but it kept going up and up instead of him stopping it at a fence height it became a wall.
Roxy smiled again. It was enjoyable having a challenge for a change. It was the difference in achievement from trying to build an athletic runner compared to trying to get a cheetah to pace itself. Both of those objectives were challenging but Roxy had trained allot of her students, many failed in the basics and she had to move pass them, they were what she referred to as "Duds."
As of right now Roxy had been training Rudeus for two weeks and he was a natural when it came to magic.
"Okay one more time!" Rudeus shouted, he had removed the previous stone wall and cast another. This one was a little bit smaller than the others but not enough.
"Good, now what did you change? Did you follow my advice?" Roxy asked.
"Yes, I put less mana into it and had a pre-determined shut off point." Rudeus said happily.
"Well done Rudeus. Remember when a magician is low on mana they need to conserve it as much as possible, so they must mentally picture a reservoir like a pool of water or in our case a pool of mana. We have a prebuilt cup of water that we pore a part of the pool into. And when the cup is filled we shut off the flow."
It was like training a child to not put too much sugar into a cake when mixing all the ingredients, it is hard to control that child's sweet tooth.
Rudeus had already learned all the basics that Roxy had taught him. Well, rather it had seemed like he was already well versed in the knowledge to beginning with. It felt more like she was telling him to jump and then he leaped up in the air and never came back down.
'Still though why are his abilities so strong. I haven't seen someone be able to use magic without speaking, not only that, his magical reserves are monstrous. I don't even know his limits…' Roxy paused for a moment in thought.
"Rudeus stop." Roxy commanded.
"Huh? Why? That rock wall was allot smaller than the other fifty I did!"
"I want you to show me where your limit is at." Roxy answered.
Rudeus had a look of panic on his face. "Master I don't want to do that, I'm worried I might destroy something important."
"You won't, focus your energy like a funnel and create wind magic, focus it up and point it at the sky keeping the air in a funnel. I want to see how strong you can make it."
"May I ask why."
"Think of it like a weightlifter, if I don't know your limits how can I push you to become better and grow more?"
"I guess that makes sense but that's not the goal of my training, it's to control my magic, not let it loose." Rudeus argued, but he made a valid point.
"There is another reason, once your magical reserves are depleted and a little grows back again, cast rock wall. Make it as small as you can, I want to see if you can make it as small as a fence and that way you will grasp the feeling once your magical reserves are back if just by a little."
'That wasn't something I had thought of.' Rudeus thought. He was hesitant, he still didn't want to intimidate Roxy but she was forcing his hand.
"Fine then, I will do it." Rudeus said gripping his fist.
"Not here though, we will do it a good distance from the house and the village in case your spell is destructive, pack two meals, we will get back by nightfall if we hurry now. I shall prepare our horse.
"Yes master." Rudeus shouted. It felt wrong for him to call her master considering that he was far more powerful than her but he had insisted on it, sometimes he called her senpai, when she asked about what that word meant, he said it was a word he made up to call someone a teacher. He was always humble and never complained, whenever he tried to argue his points were always valid.
He came back a few minutes later with a basket containing ham and cheese sandwiches Lilia had prepared for them and that Rudeus had insisted on helping to make. By the time he was done Roxy was finished securing the saddle onto the horse and they rode off.
Roxy and Rudeus talked along the way, about a large number of things. About Roxy's home in the Demon continent and her family there, how she originally learned magic and then at a later age began teaching people. She talked to him about morals and proper behavior. Honestly she just thought he was listening half of the time just to hear her voice.
"Are you listening to what I say Rudeus?"
"No not much, but you don't have to listen carefully to the beautiful chirp of a birds song to appreciate it's beauty. Your voice however, is a much purer melody than the all birds in the world." Rudeus said.
"Say that line again in ten years and I might blush." Roxy stated. No one had ever said something so kind like that before, normally it was incredibly perverted or they were scared of her because of her hair, thinking she was a terrifying demon.
They ate the sandwiches on the way and they later arrived on a hilltop with a single tree after a few hours of trotting on the horse. Roxy dismounted, picking up Rudeus and putting him down on the ground, and then she incased herself in a dome of stone as well as the horse to keep her safe and the horse from being blown away. And then Rudeus started.
He outstretched both of his hands and twisted his wrists and body as if throwing a dough of pizza into the air over and over again. He gradually put more and more magic into his spell. And the air turned from a gust of wind to a violent one. It kept building in ferocity, Rudeus was in the eye of the storm and was not harmed by its effects.
Lightning cracked across the sky from the friction being produced by the movement of the air and the earth shuddered every time the ground was struck. It kept going, getting bigger and bigger.
Many landscapes away Clive Blackheart stopped his party, Death row and all the men looked into the distance at the thunder and lighting, it went higher into the sky than they had seen any storm before, they could feel the gusts of wind from where they stood.
And then he saw something he had never seen. It was a pillar of light that was pure unbridled energy. What he was witnessing was a column of pure plasma. The atoms in the air were being condensed by Rudeus's spell and coming together, when they were being struck by the lighting the atoms lost an electron and the atom became positively charged with an electron creating plasma. Rudeus was creating a beam of energy that at it's core was hotter than the surface of the sun.
Rudeus had a moment of dangerous curiosity and used gravity, electric and wind magic to condense the mass of plasma.
"Come on, push it together, tighter, tighter."
The column of plasma descended down into the space between his hands becoming a ball. Using gravity, electric and wind Rudeus forced it to condense. Rudeus imagined it like a balloon as he squeezed each side, trying to make the gas get tighter. Now the temperature was getting really intense. At this point it had turned white in color and was impossible to look at. Rudeus's flesh started to burn a little. The combination of magic he was using was like a stone and mortar furnace, protecting him for the most part with its insolated walls but Rudeus still felt the heat. He couldn't hold it anymore. He shot his arms up and the small sun flew into the air. Rudeus kept it condensed.
'If I release it now the explosion might be too much. I need to throw it up higher!' Rudeus thought.
Meanwhile Clive looked and saw a small bright white light float up into the large storm, the light didn't go away though when it reached the clouds, it illuminated the storm like a beacon as it continued to climb.
"What the ever-living fuck?" Clive whispered.
And then BOOM!
They saw the light first before they felt the shockwave. They saw the effects of the shockwave coming though. The storm was disappearing and was being sent back, soon it became completely destroyed, the trees on the ground nearest to the explosion were cast aside like ragdolls and then the grass was swept up along with a layer of dirt.
"Everyone brace yourselves!" Clive shouted.
The men got off their horses and held onto the horse's leashes and saddles knowing that the animals would buck when the shockwave hit. The men closed their eyes and squeezed their ears with a free hand if they had one.
And then the shockwave hit them.
Clive gasped for air, it was like someone had just ignored his skin, muscles and bone, and punched him directly in the heart. He knelt down and clutched his chest trying to get himself to inhale.
After a few moments of panic he managed to get in a gasp of air. He breathed a few times to make sure he was alright. Then he looked up.
Some of his men were still recovering and others were alright like Clive was. Some of the horses had run away from their masters from shear terror. The rest continued to buck.
The leader of Death Row fell to the ground in a daze at what he had just witnessed. It was something he never thought he would experience or get to see in his life.
"Boss, what was that?" One of his men asked.
"The only explanation I have for that, was that that was a god tier level of magic." Clive stated. How could it not be? That shockwave will be felt for weeks worth of travel on horseback if not further. you saw it's effects. The noise would continue to get dimmer and dimmer but based on what you had just heard it wasn't going to get quieter any time soon"
"No way….. please tell me our information was correct and we aren't facing a god class Roxy?" One of the men spoke up.
"No, our information is solid, Darius wouldn't lie to us about our targets, he hasn't before. I don't think this will be a problem to our mission. The family we are targeting is only advanced and the one known as Roxy is only a saint class in water magic, she is advanced in the rest of her fields but not near that level."
"Understood boss, we trust you."
"As you should, Darius is the one paying you all, I trust him, and therefore you should trust me. Either way it doesn't change our objective. But for right now we will try and take a moments rest. We should arrive at the house by the middle of the night. The darkness will hide what we do to them, discreate just like our employer wanted."
And with that the group set to recuperate themselves.
Rudeus on the other hand back at ground zero of the explosion was on his knees looking up at the skies. He had done it. His mana was empty. He had normally pushed himself to this extent when building his creature and teleportation circles along with other magical circles for him to do but that took hours for him to be spent. This however had only taken a few minutes. But this feeling was like pushing yourself at the gym lifting to your limit until failure over a brief period of time, compared to several hours of pacing until failure.
Then a small drop of mana came back. He outstretched his hand and he cast rock wall.
"I did it master Roxy."
The wall was a perfect fence. There were no flaws in its design and Rudeus focused on remembering the feeling of the amount of mana he spent to make it, just one small drop, not enough for even an ant to get hydrated from with a droplet of water that small. It looked like a small picket fence you would see in a painting of a farm countryside. And then Rudeus collapsed, completely spent.
"Hey Rudeus?" Roxy said looking down at Rudeus. He was sound asleep and she was using her lap as a pillow for the boy, she had been doing this for the past hour or so. He looked so relaxed and quiet.
Looking at the surrounding landscape was not a pleasant sight. Somehow Rudeus had protected the closest area around him and Roxy. The area they were in was like a small island and then that small island was surrounded by a sea of dirt and rubble from Rudeus's spell. He used some type of condensed wind magic to keep the shockwave from damaging them and Roxy didn't even hear the explosion. It was like he created a thick atmosphere.
"Rudeus you sure are amazing. You made some type of shield didn't you? If you hadn't done that we would have been pretty badly injured, hell we might have even died."
"I'm sorry master, but I wanted to push myself like you asked." Rudeus responded.
"How long have you been awake?"
"Oh a few minutes now, I just wanted to enjoy the feeling of your lap." The young boy smiled in a semi innocent and perverted manner.
Roxy chuckled a little bit and got up letting Rudeus's head fall softly onto the grass. After a moment he got up. His pool of mana was regenerating quickly but it wouldn't be completely back until tomorrow. Right now he had about 1/10 of his power back.
"Rudeus, cast rock wall again." Roxy said trying to get Rudeus to show her he had managed to control his mana.
"oh, okay." Rudeus said, he focused and held out his hand, closing his eyes as he remembered the feeling of the small amount of mana he had used to create a stone wall.
He cast it and to his joy it was the exact size he wanted. A small fence made of stone was formed identical to the one next to it that he had previously made before he fainted.
"Very good Rudeus, you have now learned how to control your magic. Now let us return to your home."
Roxy was already getting onto the horse and she held out her hand when she had steadied herself. Rudeus got on and they were off.
"Hey sensei is it alright if I continue to take a nap on the horse, I'm pretty tired."
"If you fall asleep now then your sleep routine will be off and you won't be able to sleep tonight." Roxy stated, she was true of course but Rudeus was incredibly exhausted from the spell he had used.
"Pleeeaase master Roxy, I'm so tired from casting that spell." Rudeus begged looking at her with puppy eyes.
She sighed defeated. "Okay but first you have to explain to me that spell."
"I don't know how I did it, I made a column of energy and I didn't want it to hurt us so I tried to capture it, when I realized I was making it worse I threw it away and the explosion happened." Rudeus was of course lying, but Roxy didn't know that. He knew he had created a miniature sun between his hands. Honestly he was surprised himself that he had managed to pull off something so intense but this gave him another idea. Could he harness energy turning it into mana?
He looked up at the sun in the sky thinking of solar panels. If he could capture some of that energy he might find a new level, more so than just what his body could hold. Still he had about another six years before he hit his peak and his mana stopped growing. So for now the thought of harnessing and making mana from other things could wait.
Rudeus then fell asleep on the horse, dreaming about naked women.
The young boy and his master arrived at the home just before nightfall like Roxy had planned. They dismounted and got into the house. Immediately Rudeus was assaulted by Zenith and Paul asking if he was okay.
"We saw the sky and saw the light, then we heard the explosion, explain yourself Rudeus was that you?" Zenith asked concerned. Paul had a different response.
"If that was you son you might be strong enough to challenge any man or god by the time you are a teen." Paul then burst into laughter, he was a bit jealous sure but he was also proud of his son that he could perform such a feat.
Roxy stepped in and reported what she had seen.
"I believe Rudeus captured all the lightning from the storm he had created using wind magic and then he threw it up into the air when he realized he couldn't keep it contained. Originally he was trying to protect me from the lightning at the start and the explosion wasn't intentional." Roxy responded with a cool head.
"Rudeus is that true?" Zenith stated.
Her son only responded by acting coy and looking at the ground sheepishly while scratching the back his head. It was a dead giveaway that he was saying yes but he still didn't want to admit it.
Zenith leapt up into the air screaming hurray, she was now incredibly proud of her son, Paul slapped him on the back, Lilia smiled faintly and Roxy gave him a thumbs up. But Rudeus wasn't proud of what he did. He looked up putting on a fake smile.
'Will I be able to stop the teleportation event with this amount of power? Is it enough? And should I fail should I create countermeasures?'
But unbeknownst to everyone within the house, they would have more pressing matters to attend to that night.