Talia was still securely hitched to his back.
James stared blankly at the far woodline, seriously wondering when exactly she would get bored enough to hop off and walk around like a normal person.
"You look decent for someone who recently had a basketball-sized hole blasted directly through his chest," Talia noted.
She leaned over his shoulder, peering down at his bare torso.
Noticing the complete absence of any jagged scar tissue, she frowned slightly.
"Huh. That's weird. A direct hit from pure silver is supposed to leave a permanent mark."
James offered a dry, slightly weary smile. "I guess I just have a pretty good healing factor."
Talia shot him a look that screamed 'Don't we all, dipshit?' but she managed to exercise enough self-restraint to keep from saying it out loud.
"I see," she muttered. Still, her internal suspicion lingered. Getting punctured by a silver weapon of that purity should have left a distinct, lasting blemish on any standard werewolf's skin.
To their kind, a silver strike was the biological equivalent of a regular human getting run through with a combat knife—a deep thrust into the chest cavity was always going to leave a scar.
'Is it just because he's a newborn asset?' she wondered curiously, though she couldn't quite bring herself to fully care about the medical semantics.
Sensing an opportunity to annoy her teammate, Mira stepped closer to the edge of the clearing.
"And more importantly, Talia, you can't teach worth a damn. You don't possess a single ounce of the patience required for it. Let a real reinforcement specialist handle the newcomer."
Mira wasn't exactly lying. While Talia's personal reinforcement output was perfectly fine, Mira was the unit's dedicated hand-to-hand vanguard.
She was the one who consistently charged into the thick of battle to draw the enemy's direct aggro—the pure barbarian of the squad, so to speak.
Naturally, her mastery over physical hardening was exceptionally high, bested only by Kaela and perhaps Caius.
The co captain was remarkably efficient; even now, during a period of absolute peace, a microscopic, razor-thin layer of aura coated his frame at all times.
He had even engineered a method to keep the defensive mantle online while he slept.
That level of passive mastery was something Mira hadn't fully unlocked yet, as she still required a semi-conscious mental state to keep her barrier stabilized.
Talia did not appreciate the administrative slander.
Even as she remained clamped to James's back like a highly territorial koala, her posture stiffened.
"Excuse you? I can teach just fine! It's called experiential learning, Mira. Look it up. Besides, I'm perfectly comfortable right here."
James quietly pondered what exactly he had done in a past life to deserve becoming a biological playground.
Yet, as he adjusted his posture to balance her, he realized something odd: Talia didn't actually feel heavy.
He caught himself before the thought could sound wrong—normally, carrying a fully grown, athletic woman on your back would cause a noticeable strain.
But to James, it felt like he was carrying nothing more than a light paper bag.
Even with her petite visual appearance, he could feel the incredible, dense muscularity of her core wrapped around his shoulders.
He wondered if the werewolf species simply possessed an extraordinarily compact biological build.
With the sheer amount of monstrous strength he now controlled, he had expected his physical body to become significantly bulkier to naturally compensate for the massive structural load.
He could physically lift multiple tons of dead weight, yet his personal scale weight hadn't shifted by a single pound since his transformation.
While James was busy analyzing the density of werewolf anatomy, Mira simply rolled her eyes at Talia's antics. Then, a sharp, terrifyingly familiar gleam ignited within her light blue eyes.
A feral, intensely competitive smile tugged at the corners of Mira's mouth as her gaze trailed down James's bare, scratched frame.
She suddenly remembered the rain check on the spar he had promised her. Recalling the latent power he had displayed on the shoreline, she felt a sudden rush of adrenaline flood her system, excitement visibly blooming across her features.
The raw strength and adaptability he had showcased during the merman skirmish had thoroughly intrigued her.
Currently, she was still the dominant fighter. In a base-to-base physical contest, his Alpha biology technically gave him a superior raw metric, but unlike him, she possessed decades of refined magic, compressed aura, and combat experience.
Due to the genetic progression of their race, darkness magic naturally grew more potent with age.
Alpha Aldric, for example, was currently pushing five hundred years of age, yet his power ceiling had never stopped ascending because he maintained a flawless physical regimen.
However, a werewolf's power curve scaled exponentially when their life was actively on the line.
Every single time a wolf survived severe physical trauma and forced their body to regenerate, their muscle fibers and magical pathways returned significantly stronger than before.
This specific evolutionary trait was exactly why the vanguards constantly sparred at near-lethal thresholds, and it was precisely why the entire race was pathologically obsessed with throwing hands.
Right now, Mira's blood was actively boiling for a fight.
"Actually… I just remembered something. Newbie, didn't we have a rain check on our little match? The promise of a fight doesn't just fade away, James."
James's spine instantly went rigid. His mind immediately raced to the fact that his ribs were still actively throbbing from the absolute beating Luna had handed him on the mountain.
He paused, a sudden realization hitting him. Wait... why am I still healing from that? Given his newly acquired baseline regeneration, it should have been physically impossible for standard bruises to linger this long.
Sensing deeper into his own internal networks, he found the anomaly: a faint, icy residue of Luna's oppressive aura was still actively circulating through his system.
'Whoa, aura can actually be weaponized like that?' James thought. Instead of being concerned, a wave of genuine excitement washed over him.
Feeling the leftover remnants of her foreign essence sitting inside his body... okay, pause, let's rephrase that immediately, he thought, shaking his head.
Feeling the leftover traces of her magic inside his system proved that high-tier aura could actively delay an opponent's recovery window until the energy was fully expelled from the bloodstream.
Unfortunately, James had entirely forgotten that an incredibly eager vanguard was still standing directly in front of him, waiting for an answer.
Sensing the way James's aura suddenly lit up the moment she mentioned the challenge, Mira's grin widened.
Fuck yeah.
But before she could step forward to throw a celebratory opening strike, Caius smoothly intervened.
He had easily tracked James's distracted internal monologue and decided to throw the kid a tactical lifeline.
"Mira, stand down," Caius commanded smoothly, never once lifting his eyes from the manga.
"James will first learn the conceptual fundamentals of stabilization under Talia. Once he has successfully mastered the baseline mantle, he can practice practical application by engaging in a regulated spar with you. That is a fair distribution of labor."
With the executive order handed down, Caius returned his full attention to the text. His brain was completely occupied by the climax of the Greed Island arc—he was right in the middle of the high-stakes dodgeball match against Razor, and he wasn't about to let standard squad bickering disrupt his reading flow.
Though, internally, the character of Hisoka briefly reminded him of a certain unhinged individual back at the main citadel.
A brief shiver ran down Caius's spine, and he quickly pushed the thought away. He really didn't need to think about that freak right now.
Talia let out a triumphant, ringing "Ha!" before finally hopping off James's back with the fluid, effortless agility of a cat.
She dropped onto the torn grass directly in front of him, squaring her shoulders as her playful demeanor instantly melted into an expression of intense, professional focus.
"Alright, pay close attention, newborn pup," Talia said, tapping her own chest.
James's golden wolf eyes sharpened instinctively, his focus locking onto her form.
Now that his senses were properly adjusted, he could see it clearly—the ambient spiritual energy floating around her physical frame suddenly began to ripple, compressing tightly until a visible, shimmering, translucent layer of pure aura coated her body like a pressurized second skin.
It was perfectly uniform, vibrating at a high frequency that radiated a subtle, prickling heat into the surrounding air.
"Right now, this is just pure spiritual compression," Talia explained, beginning to pace in a slow, deliberate circle around him.
"Later on, once your baseline muscle memory automatically recognizes this exact density, you can begin to overlay your darkness magic into the frequency. Mixing your innate element with your raw aura is where the real fun begins."
She stopped, turning to face him with a vibrant, knowing grin. "And don't think it just acts as a shield to lessen incoming kinetic damage, either.
If you channel this compressed mantle directly into your fists or legs at the exact millisecond of impact, it exponentially multiplies your physical strength and destructive output. It's basically exactly like Ki from Dragon Ball."
James raised a highly skeptical, thoroughly amused eyebrow. "Wait… you actually know what Dragon Ball is?"
Talia's expression instantly flattened into an annoyed, defensive pout. "What? Do I look like an uncultured brute to you, James?"
For the absolute safety of his long-term physical health, James wisely chose to keep his mouth shut, offering nothing more than a neutral, non-committal blink.
"Yes, I know what it is," she huffed, crossing her arms over her chest.
"It's practically one of the most popular mortal broadcasts on the entire planet. The vast majority of the supernatural community is fully aware of it. Trust me, half the younger vanguards downstairs spent their entire youth trying to figure out how to replicate a Kamehameha using raw plasma magic."
"I see," James murmured, genuinely baffled by the pop-culture crossover.
But then again, Dragon Ball was entirely about fighting, and this entire race lived to throw hands, so it actually made perfect sense.
He wondered if plasma magic would technically fall under the category of synthetic magic, considering plasma technically existed in nature long before humanity arrived to harness it.
Or perhaps it was an evolved variation of fire magic—essentially fire compressed to extreme temperatures.
It was a massive simplification, but it tracked.
"So, quick question. Can this compressed aura layer be used to actively power or catalyze actual spellcasting?"
"Yep! Watch this," Talia said.
She raised her right hand, flattening her palm. Instantly, the shimmering aura surrounding her skin swirled toward her fingertips, condensing into a sharp, violently vibrating crescent of pure kinetic pressure.
With a subtle flex of her will, the invisible air blade expanded, doubling its original size until the ambient wind in the clearing began to whistle sharply against the rotating edge.
James stared intently at the manifesting energy, his brow furrowing as he tried to map out the exact spiritual taxonomy of the system.
"Wait… if aura can do all of that, then what is the actual difference between aura and magic? Aren't they technically drawing from the exact same source material?"
Talia paused. The whistling air blade immediately dissipated into nothingness as her eyes went completely blank.
She opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and then stared blankly up at the sky.
Her brain was visibly stalling out in real-time as she desperately dug for a textbook definition she had clearly skipped during her academic years.
From twenty yards away, Mira let out a loud, mocking snort.
"Oh, look at that. The grand instructor doesn't even know the baseline mechanics of her own species. What a absolute shocker."
"I do too know the answer!" Talia snapped back defensively, her cheeks flaring with a prominent, embarrassed blush.
"Alright, genius, then go ahead and explain it to the newcomer," Mira teased, leaning her hip against the heavy tree trunk with a smug grin.
"What's the mechanical difference?"
Talia looked completely panicked, her eyes darting frantically toward the bench for assistance.
Sighing softly, Caius decided to throw his stranded teammate a bone.
He adjusted his metal hairpin, his calm, anchoring voice cutting through the tension.
"No, James. They are fundamentally distinct energetic pools."
James immediately turned his full attention toward the squad captain, eager for the official lore drop.
"Your aura is quite literally the physical embodiment of your spiritual vitality and personal will,"
Caius explained precisely, using his fingers to map out the biological taxonomy.
"It is the raw life force generated directly by your soul's presence within a physical vessel. Magic, however, is a composite pool—it is a meticulous fusion of an individual's physical cellular energy, mental fortitude, and ambient spiritual mana. Aura is an internal projection; magic is an external alchemical equation."
"Yeah! Exactly what he said! That!" Talia chimed in instantly, nodding her head vigorously as if she had known the answer all along. "It's a composite pool, James. Duh."
You could tell from a literal mile away that her ass didn't have a single clue until Caius opened his mouth.
Mira didn't miss the opportunity, letting out a sharp chuckle. "Nice save, captain. Talia, your academic fraud is showing."
"Shut up, Mira! I knew that!" Talia complained, pointing an angry finger at her teammate. "I was just… testing him! Seeing if he could articulate the concepts properly!"
"Talia," Caius's tone dropped into a mild, slightly disappointed register as his eyes drifted back down toward his open page.
"This is precisely why the elders insisted you spend more time reviewing the ancient scrolls. Your lack of technical study is becoming a functional operational hazard."
Talia's shoulders instantly slumped, her expression twisting into a thoroughly annoyed pout as she kicked a stray pebble into the dirt.
"I did study! I've just been… incredibly busy with other, highly important vanguard duties lately!"
A/N You may have noticed it, but one of the components for magic, is basically what make aura. Your magic is determined by alot of factors. Long story short, aura can be used to enhance magic spells, but magic spells cannot be used to enhance Aura.
Next chapter probably thursday, and then friday, 4 chapter this week, since i want it to be so.