Following the success of his Earth element experiment, Dex moved immediately to test his second innate element: Water. The atmosphere of Falus Forest was humid and suffocating, the air saturated with the spray of dense fog. In theory, this represented a tremendous tactical advantage for water-magic users; the environment itself supplied the ammunition without the need to expend internal Mana to conjure water from nothing.
"Let us see if I can play with the moisture," Dex thought.
He extended his right hand into the open air and began to shift the frequency of his Mana. Earth Mana had been heavy and stable; Water Mana was cold, fluid, and mercurial. He attempted to draw the scattered water molecules from the fog, commanding them to gather in the hollow of his palm. He felt a faint chill, and a few microscopic droplets began to condense between his fingers like cold perspiration. But the process was agonisingly slow, and he could feel his Mana Core being depleted at a frightening rate-all to gather a spoonful of water.
"Damn it!" Dex cursed under his breath, closing his fist to dispel the magic as he caught his breath and wiped genuine sweat from his brow. "The novel was precise. Drawing water directly from the air requires enormous control and Mana of at least Rank C. My feeble Core is nearly bursting from this effort alone. I cannot rely on atmospheric humidity in actual combat."
It was a bitter setback-but Dex's analytical mind does not linger at failure. "If extracting water from the air is prohibitively costly... what if I worked with water that already exists in liquid form? That would reduce Mana consumption by ninety percent."
Dex quickly retrieved the small leather canteen hanging from his wide belt. He opened the wooden stopper and, rather than drinking, poured only a few drops into the air. Before the droplets could meet the ground in answer to gravity, he released a fine current of Water Mana from his fingertips and seized them in mid-air-as though suspending them on invisible threads.
He manipulated the water with a widening smile. Controlling liquid was far easier-like reaching his hand into a still pond. But water in its ordinary state cannot wound anyone. He needed a weapon. With intense focus, Dex began spinning the small globe of water. He steadily increased its rotational speed, using his Mana as a centrifugal force, until the water globe flattened into a thin disc-blade-thin and razor-flat-spinning at terrifying speed and emitting a faint, hushed whirring sound in the air.
Dex brought his finger close and let the spinning water blade graze the bark of the colossal tree beside him.
Shick.
With a sharp sound like tearing silk, the water blade cut through the hard bark and left a deep, clean groove in the wood of the tree.
"Remarkable..." Dex whispered, studying the result before he lost control and the droplets scattered to the ground. "The second tactical principle: the Water element in my current state does not require vast quantities or crushing pressure to be lethal. Water is the element of precision. It requires no muscular force-only momentum and velocity. Spinning water fast enough makes it as cutting as Damascus steel."
At the peak of his exhilaration over these discoveries, a very rare piece of knowledge flickered in his mind-an idea mentioned only in passing throughout the original novel, employed by the hero solely in its most advanced stages: Elemental Synergy.
Most sorcerers possessed a single element. Those who wielded two typically deployed them separately. Blending elements demanded extraordinarily complex mental calculations to prevent a magical detonation. But Dex possessed the mind of a meticulous planner, elevated Intellect, and two elements that were chemically compatible.
"What if..." Dex's eyes gleamed with a diabolical idea.
He repeated the experiment-but this time channelled Earth Mana into his left hand and Water Mana into his right, then attempted to merge them within a patch of soil before him. The initial result was chaotic. But he refocused on the physical nature of the mixture rather than on the raw magic, and the outcome was neither pure water nor solid earth-it was a thick, deep mud, akin to quicksand. A one-metre circle of firm ground transformed in an instant into a small, sucking bog.
"Excellent-but mud alone will only slow a beast, not stop it," Dex thought, his smile broadening into the grin of a predator laying its final trap. "But... what if I made the ground beneath the beast turn to this sticky mud, and the moment it sank its legs in, I reversed the process? What if I used Water magic to pull every last drop of moisture from that mud in a fraction of a second?"
His physics-tuned mind supplied the answer at once: the sudden absence of water would create a void, and the remaining earth would be compressed violently under the force of the Earth Mana. The waterlogged ground would be transformed into solid rock-bone-dry and utterly rigid within a single second. He would lock their legs inside magical concrete shackles that nothing could break.
He had just invented a composite spell of Rank E-but with a tactical impact equivalent to a Rank C incantation. A technique capable of immobilising beasts that outclassed him in raw power by several orders of magnitude.
While Dex was smiling at the success of his ingenious experiments and contemplating how to deploy the concrete trap against the first beast he encountered-the collapse came.
Without warning, his vision blacked out for a fraction of a second. A violent dizziness struck the back of his skull like a hammer blow. His head pitched forward in sudden weakness, and his heart began to pound at a terrifying, arrhythmic rate-like a bird hurling itself against the bars of a rib cage. His limbs trembled beyond his control. A wave of severe nausea rolled through him as though someone were pulling his insides out, and a brutal cold seeped into his very bones.
Dex dropped to his knees, gasping savagely for the oxygen that seemed to have vanished from the air.
"Damn it..." he groaned, gripping his chest. "This is... Mana Sickness."
He had overestimated himself. The excitement had made him forget the truth of his body. He called up his status screen-and found the Mana gauge flashing in urgent warning red. He had consumed eighty percent of his total magical reserves in what amounted to a brief, casual training session lasting less than ten minutes.
This was the bitter, humiliating reality of Rank E.
"I have the mind of a great strategist and the tactical understanding of a war general," Dex thought bitterly as he waited for his heart to settle. "But I have the battery of a broken pocket torch. My own body is my worst enemy right now."
Dex sat on the earthen floor with his back against the tree trunk, eyes closed for several minutes. He practised the deep-breathing techniques he had read about to accelerate Mana recovery, trying to absorb the tiny traces of energy from his surroundings. During those minutes, his analytical mind codified the strict rules of engagement that would guarantee his survival:
Rule One - The Time Limit:
Any combat he found himself in must be concluded in under three minutes. If a fight extended beyond that threshold, he would lose consciousness from Mana exhaustion and become easy prey.
Rule Two - Earth (Radar and Shield):
Used exclusively for long-range sensing to avoid unnecessary encounters, and for creating lethal obstacles and micro-terrain-concealed stone spikes, altered ground surfaces.
Rule Three - Water (The Guillotine):
Deployed as a precise, swift melee weapon-spinning water blades-to sever tendons and throats. Reliant exclusively on water carried in the canteen, never drawn from the air.
Rule Four - The Mud-and-Concrete Trap (The Trump Card):
Reserved exclusively for beasts too powerful to outmanoeuvre-deployed to achieve total immobilisation before delivering the killing blow.
After a quarter of an hour, colour began to return to his ashen face and the trembling in his hands subsided. He had recovered roughly thirty percent of his Mana-enough to continue moving with caution.
Dex rose slowly. The despair that had weighed on him since morning was gone. He brushed the soil and dead leaves from his tattered black coat. He drew his poisoned dagger and let it rest comfortably in his right hand, while his left hand primed itself to weave Mana at a moment's notice.
He looked into the dark depths of Falus Forest. Now, having understood his capabilities and made peace with his elements, he no longer feared the forest in the blind, instinctive way of prey. He had tasted the pulse of the earth and felt the current of the water. He was no longer the outcast nobleman thrown into hell-he had become, through the instrument of his prisoner's mind, an indivisible part of that hell's terrain.
He resumed walking eastward, toward the Lake of Silver Tears. He was a novice hunter possessed of a veteran's mind, taking his first steps across the chessboard of Ekarthas.