Chapter 52: Main Event!
Ren leaned back on the padded bench in the corner of the academy’s training hall, head tilted toward the ceiling, chest rising and falling like he’d just wrestled a dragon in a sauna.
Which, honestly, wasn’t too far off from what he just went through. A training dummy, now shredded into several very unrecognizable chunks, still sparked and twitched somewhere behind him.
A thin shimmer of lingering energy danced over the marks on the floor, and somewhere nearby, the wall had a new hole that looked suspiciously shaped like a kusarigama.
Ren ignored it. The room smelled like sweat, burnt magic, and the faint scent of something metallic, probably from all the sparks his last strike caused.
His black undershirt clung to his body like a second skin, soaked in sweat, and yet, despite the exhaustion, his face was glowing with a stupid, satisfied grin as he unscrewed the cap of his water bottle and took a long, glorious gulp.
He had done it.
After two days of endless struggle, dozens of trial runs, a few minor bruises, a couple of Loom feedback shocks, and more grumbling than an old warlock with arthritis, he had finally mastered the first weave of his new affinity.
The feeling was impossible to describe.
He was now fifty percent sure he wouldn’t get absolutely destroyed by Mirabella today.
Fifty. Percent.
That was about as close to a guarantee as you could get when fighting someone as terrifyingly unpredictable and... well... perfect as Mirabella.