Beyond M-Eclipse: Easy Mode LIVE

———Lerim———

<10: 04 am>

“When did this place get renovated?” Evari asked as both of us walked into the training room, or exam room, or whatever you wanna call it.

“Did it? It looked the same as always.” I said that in response. There isn’t much visible change to the place. “Anyway, let’s get this over with quickly.”

I threw her a wooden spear while I grabbed a bamboo sword, walking to the other side of the room. She looks quite tense as she ready up with a stance while I simply stand here casually without my weapon raised. I should give her a little bit of slack with the gap in strength.

*Block* *Evade* *Block* *Parry*

She ran towards me and I casually avoided all attacks from her, each move being too slow for me to really be worried about. Each move is easy to predict and the difference in our power means that I really should never get hit by any of her attacks. She looks quite pressed despite being fully on the offensive and trying to attack from all available angles, each one I can quickly intercept and render them ineffective.

“Haaa! Haaa…!” She is starting to sweat a bit as the sparring match keeps going. Each attack was still easily countered and I haven’t used even half my strength so far. Not even a third, probably.

*Tap* *Tap* *Tap* *Tap* *Tap*

I then began attacking and poke her with the bamboo sword, moving around and striking her from multiple sides in quick succession before she could even properly react. On her head, her arms, her legs, her back, just hitting her everywhere, peppering her with kids’ gloves on. Each hit should barely do any damage but the quantity of attacks is clearly bothering her a whole lot, barely able to make a move as she is very slowly whittled down.

*Smack*

“Uagh!?” I then smacked her in the head since she failed to retaliate despite me pulling my punches.

“Let’s end it at that. I think it’s already made quite clear the gap between us.” Prolonging this sparring match would simply be a waste of time.

“Ow… Did I even get a hit in?” She said while both of us store the weapons away.

“Nothing that I can tell.” Unless she hits like a pillow I’m pretty sure she didn’t hit me once. “Anyway, what are you even doing after this?”

“It’s still early in the day, right? I think I’ll take a small break after that beatdown.” She said as both left the training room and found a table to sit at. “What even is that video yesterday anyway?”

“I thought I already said what it was. All of you still seem to be in disbelief after seeing the ending there.” I already made it clear that it wasn’t edited. I suppose I do have at least two reliable sources of information while everyone else had to take my word for it, but we did hear about an attack on a national scale a few days ago, so surely this isn’t hard to believe. The scale is much smaller here.

“Easy for you to say. It does look too choreographed for it to be real.” She argued. “The fact that you didn’t die from fighting her is absurd if we take that video as facts.”

“And as I said, I’m also pretty strong myself, so obviously I didn’t get folded in seconds.” And that’s not even counting the fact that she probably wasn’t using her full strength against me, and that she never intended to kill me in the first place. I wasn’t exactly in danger, kinda.

“...Still hard to believe you can also blow up a city that big.” She remarked. I think she is missing a few contexts here.

“I still lost the recent fight, you know? It’s not as if I’m equal to her in power. I can blow up a city, but not with ease like that nor a place called a metropolis.” It’s been a week and yet it feels like the gap in power between the two of us has already increased by a significant margin. It wasn’t exactly something I didn’t anticipate, Karra had already warned me that she would snowball out of control eventually. Catching up to her is a fool’s errand, and that there is really only one goal I need to strive towards in terms of power. A threshold that once passed became a deterrent for others to antagonize you, even if they’re much stronger.

“...You can’t just say you can blow up a city so casually…” She said with quite a worried expression. Considering what we witnessed yesterday I would call it pretty unremarkable in the grand scheme of things, not that I should go do it.

“Regardless of what you think, that sort of thing already happened. Either in those first few weeks or even not too long ago. One individual can do that. No tools, just nothing but their own strength.” At this point we just gotta accept the fact that everything that has been built up to last and takes a lot of effort can be taken down in only a few minutes. It’s a harrowing spectacle.

“...Are we ever gonna talk about those first few weeks?” She asked, clearly uncomfortable with that topic.

“We don’t have to. It’s a massive can of worms with very little coverage anyway, mostly because the people who tried died.” Went by in a flash and suddenly it caused devastation in a lot of areas. “Let’s just focus on what’s happening nowadays. Like how a lot of people here seem to be confused about the whole battle royale.”

“Of course they will be.” She argued. “How strong is an average student anyway? Why are they moving like that?”

“...I’ll be honest, even the weaker ones might give you trouble. They are teaching fundamentals over there, which gives all of them a massive head-start compared to literally everyone else aside from the Mage Remnants, but those barely count in my eyes.” People often forget how important a teacher is, even ones that only show you the bare basics of any trades. There’s a reason that even in shows with obscenely powerful protagonists they still start off with a mentor, even if they tend to become obsolete very quickly.

“Weird how a term like Mage Remnants just… became a thing in my lexicon now. It sounds kinda fake.” She remarked, probably having a complicated feeling over being roped into some trouble because of me, mostly.

“You just have to live with it. I’m pretty sure some of those terms are still considered made up by the masses, mainly due to how unbelievable it sounds despite… you know, magic.” At this point there’s a lot of things we could probably just hear and react with a straight face. “Gotta be more accepting of more absurd things before things ultimately go off the rails. Sooner or later we might run into aliens.”

“What the hell would even happen at that point…” She said, feeling quite defeated with more absurd proposals coming out of my mouth. “Can we just talk about… I don’t know, what did you have for breakfast?”

“I ate one of these, obviously.” I said before pulling out one of the lunchboxes. A lot of protein which makes me kinda sound like a fitness freak, but I buy some vegetables and fruits to compensate for the monster meats. “What about you?”

“Yesterday’s leftovers.” She quickly answered. Not very specific…

“Better than eating cereal and all that nonsense. Can’t believe people get fooled by that for decades.” Nothing but empty calories that don’t even make you feel full. Just a scam to keep you eating more and destroy what might be your natural good looks. “We really should destroy factories making those things.”

“Please don’t do anything like that.” She said to something I said in the spur of the moment.

“Whatever, at least people like us burn so many calories that it doesn’t matter anyway as long as we don’t overdose on any possibly toxic additives.” When you’re in a battle-ready state you burn up a surprising amount of energy, which does come with a problem of needing more sustenance so your daily budget increases by quite a bit.

“Weirdly nice way to keep your figure nice, not that it makes losing weight that much faster.” She remarked. There are obviously some problems with using that as a method.

“Without constantly applying healing magic it could become a problem, mainly if you exert a lot of force due to being so powerful. I think the fact that having a massive mana pool can extend your life expectancy and yet there aren’t millions of Ahdeids running around probably has something to do with it. You almost always damage your body and reduce said expectancy by almost an equal amount.” I said that and she seemed to perk up.

“Huh? Really?” She seems quite surprised by what I’m saying.

“Obviously. Battling requires you to strain yourself way more than any sports or even being a soldier. It’s like a racehorse pushing themselves to the limit and causing many health issues and lifelong injury that tend to lead to them dying earlier than they should. Of course that’s also discounting the fact that racehorses don’t have the most healthy life compared to other kinds of horses, but you know what I mean.” One’s own mana pool does help fix it up, but like I said it only managed to off-set it more than anything.

“...When did you follow horse racings?” She asked in bewilderment.

“It’s something my friend knows about, she yaps about it sometimes.” Her having horse ears also helped with being interested, but that’s neither here nor there.

“...So is healing magic very important then? I think you know it, right?” Evari asked despite the fact that that should be common knowledge at this point.

“Quite important, but it’s also one of the hardest categories of spell to learn, it’s why healers are so rare and are given quite a hefty salary.” They get quite a cushy job. Even if their healing isn’t very effective it does tend to help someone in critical condition persist until an operation could be done on them.

“...Then why are you still a…” She hesitates to finish the question.

“Spots for healers here are all eaten up already, and I don’t want to deal with being stuck in a room for a long time.” I quite like the freedom of sticking to dungeon diving. It lets me relax and not get too stressed out. “Besides, do you really want me to steal other people’s jobs?”

“I wasn’t saying that…” She argued while scratching her head.

“At the moment I don’t really know what my limit on healing magic is, but I bet it’s probably a lot better than what a lot of people here can do. I don’t need to prove myself on that front.” They probably can’t even do it in the middle of combat if they needed to.

“Alright, alright. I get that… So how hard is learning healing magic actually?” Evari asked, looking a bit annoyed at my factual boast.

“How should I know? I just know that most people have a hard time learning it because otherwise we would’ve stopped bitching about healthcare by now.” That is still a massive problem, and all the incident means there is a lot of hospital bills needing to be paid.

“I guess that’s a pretty easy assumption…” She remarked. “But how did you learn it then?”

“I asked for a transcript on it. Not actually that helpful. Just a bunch of vague words on what sort of mental state you should be in when learning that type of spell.” Magic is mostly about feelings that can’t be accurately described in text, so all I really got were… I don’t even quite remember how I figured it out initially. “There is an excerpt about mortal danger leading to developing healing magic quickly, but obviously that’s not a requirement.”

“...No other clues on that?” She asked, clearly wanting an easy way out. The idea that her lifespan could be shortened for doing too many dungeon runs and fighting in general had clearly spooked her.

“I mean. I could cut you open and heal you, that might help you learn the spell. Observing and imitating can help.” I jokingly suggest and she is clearly not amused with the slightly terrified look on her face. “...I guess you just have to try. No other options there.”

“...Please tell me I won’t actually die early…” She said, clearly feeling quite defeated.

“Like it said, it equalizes out so you’ll have a normal human lifespan. It’s not such a pressing issue. Besides, I doubt most people are even going to reach a point where they can both stop aging and have a very long lifespan.” It’s a very ambitious and unlikely goal for anyone to achieve, so she shouldn’t dwell on it.

“...You really should’ve never brought that up in the first place.” She complained. That’s not really my problem now, is it? She needs to reconcile that by herself.

Besides, it’s not like she’s the type to fight so much that lasting damage would even occur. I can think of a lot of people where that kind of phenomenon would apply to.