Chapter 3: The Aberration and the Swords
As a proper geek and a former university professor from Teia, I had never been an athlete. My aptitude for physical warfare was practically zero, and my connection to the traditional magic of this medieval world was even worse: nonexistent.
However, I possessed an advantage that no native of this plane had: the mental discipline of a scientist and the muscle memory for survival of an interdimensional gladiator.
The next day, I was taken to the training yard. The morning sun had barely cleared the stone walls of the fortress when I met my instructor. He was the commander of the defense troops and my father's right-hand man.
He was a gargantuan, robust man with red hair and a matching beard, possessing a voice that sounded like a rumble of thunder. He was broad, serious, and as unmoving as an oak log—or rather, a mountain bear. Looking at that wall of muscle and red fur, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing out loud.
A literal Teddy Bear in armor, I thought, finding the contrast hilarious.
Later, when I heard the guards pronouncing his name, I almost died laughing on the inside, though at the moment I was too focused to understand the big guy's rustic surname. To me, he would simply be Instructor Garrick.
The physical training was a shock to him. Although I was trapped inside a weak, six-year-old body, I pushed myself with the stubbornness of a veteran soldier. I did not cry, I did not ask to stop, and I repeated the movements with a mechanical precision that no child of that age would have the patience to execute.
But the real complication began when Garrick told me to choose a training weapon from the wooden rack. My eyes ignored the shields and axes. Instinctively, a legacy from my days in the astral arena as the Hundred-Handed Warrior, my tiny hands grabbed two wooden short swords.
Garrick's brow furrowed so deeply that his red eyebrows almost met.
"Children do not train with two swords, little master," he growled, his deep voice echoing across the yard. "Combat requires the balance of a shield or the weight of a single blade to direct your strength."
I ignored the warning and assumed a guard stance.
When we began the light testing strikes, the instructor became completely bewildered. The way I positioned my feet, the manner in which I crossed my blades to deflect his blows... everything demonstrated a refined technique and an absurd amount of combat experience.
However, my six-year-old physical body was extremely clumsy and weak, creating a bizarre contrast. It was like trying to run state-of-the-art software on an old, slow computer.
The commands from my adult mind kept lagging within my childish muscles.From a distance, I saw Garrick approach my father, Lord Arl, who was watching everything with his arms crossed. I forced my auditory channels, trying to use a remnant of telekinesis to vibrate the air and catch what they were whispering.
"There is something wrong with the boy, milord," the red-haired instructor said, adjusting his leather belt with a puzzled expression.
"He exerts himself like a grown man, but his movements do not match his age. His stance with the two swords looks like that of an experienced duelist, yet his body is clumsy, as if he were... relearning how to walk. It makes no sense."
I swallowed hard, keeping my expression neutral while pretending to wipe the sweat from my forehead with the sleeve of my tunic.
Did I mess up? I chided myself mentally. I need to disguise this better, or they'll think I've been possessed by a demon.
If the military instructor was confused, the arrival of the castle's mage turned that confusion into pure horror.Master Alistair was a grumpy old man dressed in grey robes that smelled of old parchment and dried herbs. He brought a channeling crystal to test my aptitude for the Magic Weave.
The test was supposed to be simple: he would project a tiny spark of pure mana toward me to see if my body absorbed or repelled it naturally.
As soon as Alistair began the incantation, whispering words in a mystical dialect, the crystal in his hand started to glow with a bluish tint. But in the very next second, the glow flickered.The mage's face turned pale. He took a step back, his eyes widening behind his wrinkles, staring at the space around me as if he were seeing a ghost.
Through my logical perception, I realized what was happening: the mage could see the magical energy in the environment, and he was watching the mana simply bend away from my body. The magical energy of the world collided with my psychic aura and fled, refusing to touch me.
"By the eyes of the gods..." Alistair whispered, his voice trembling with dread as he turned to my father. "Lord Arl... this is an aberration!"
The border lord stepped forward, his hand instinctively resting on the pommel of his sword.
"What do you mean by that, mage? Explain yourself!"
"The mana... the energy that moves life and creation... it flees from him! It does not touch him!" the old man muttered, pointing a shaking finger at me.
"A living body must have an echo in the Magic Weave. But your son... he is an outlier. He is hollow! There is no mana in him at all!
Has the boy been abjured by some planar entity, or cursed with the worst of heresies? I have never seen anything like this in all my existence!"
On the inside, the geek professor in me gave a sly smirk.
Boy, I really am an outlier, and you understand absolutely nothing about psychic quantum mechanics, I thought, feeling a quiet sense of pride.
They called it an "aberration"; I called it Pure Psionism: Total Mana Rejection.
Despite the scare, the mage's panicked complaints provided me with valuable scientific data. While he argued with my father about "how the world worked," explaining the currents of mana and the polarity of the natural elements of that plane, my scientist brain began to cross-reference the information with what I knew about Teia and the Astral Arena.
If the mana of this world functioned like a network of fluid, elemental energy filling the atmosphere, I didn't need to absorb it to create my powers.
In fact, since the mana rejected me and moved away from me, I could use that very magnetic distortion to accelerate the surrounding oxygen atoms (Pyrokinesis) or slow them down to absolute zero (Cryokinesis).
The magical rejection was, in reality, my greatest catalyst.
However, like any good scientist, I knew that many practical tests needed to be done in secret before manifesting even a single spark of heat or ice.
One miscalculation in this young body, and I could freeze my own blood or burn out my nervous system.Master Alistair finished speaking with my father. Casting one last glance at me, full of suspicion and disgust, he turned his back and walked away from the yard, muttering about grimoires and dark omens.
My father stood frozen in the center of the yard, looking at me with a mixture of sadness and severe worry.
The lord believed his only heir was cursed, and that the Vance lineage was in even greater danger than the poison on the road had suggested.They thought I was weak because I was empty. Little did they know that emptiness is the perfect space to build an empire.
