Desolate 'Training'

I expected a lot from training. But this was not it. Never did I think my training would involve study. Not that I complained. Dragoon knew things and was willing to share it with me and I was willing to learn but I really expected physical training.

Apparently Dragoon wasn't the fighter type, he called himself a thinking or strategic type. He was more interested in learning things and that applied to fights too. My Waking had roused an urge in him to study and understand me and find methods to counter me. Right now he wanted to see me grow and that's what the training was geared towards.

"Is your Waking electricity or lightning?"

We were outside at the moment, in the large open space in front of the cave.

A good place to train he said. 

That was I had thought too. A good place to train physically. I fully expected to be subjected to intense back breaking training. Forced to climb the cliff side, forced to fight creatures beyond my current caliber, forced to hunt and forage by myself without the help of my equipment, forced to carry heavy boulders across the Desolate Lands. That was what I expected. But this was fine.

The invasive thoughts of physical training kept popping up in my mind. I guess I was kind of bummed out by the fact that I wouldn't be getting any as of right now.

But you make do with what you got, so I focused up and faced Dragoon in his 'intellectual' training. 'Developing the muscles of the mind' he called it and then refused to accept any of my corrections in stating that the mind was just a floating blob of mostly fat and muscles could not be developed. 

'Maybe I should teach you about metaphors first' came a reply and I gave up. 

"Lightning." I answered, "But I can tone it down enough to become electricity."

"And what all can you do.."

"Well, I can completely turn into the element and that would prevent any physical attack form actually harming me. But it is extremely tiring so I use it as a last reserve."

"You did it when you ran away from me...."

Ah he realized it. I mean he would have done the same if he was in my shoes. I wasn't going to pretend like it wasn't the best course of action at that moment.

So, I just shrugged and nodded.

"I'm able to send bolts of lightning at my hands, but it spreads and it isn't really accurate but it does significant damage to whatever it hits and even causes burns."

Dragoon didn't respond to the information so I guess he wanted more.

Another thing I had come to realize was that I liked the company. It felt nice speaking to someone after all this time. The alone time was fine at first but once I started getting into my own thoughts, it became quite torturous. My mental wellbeing took a dive. I appreciated this.

And I continued," I use my electricity to send shock into my enemies to paralyze them. It stiffens the muscles and makes it easy to kill them."

"Ah smart use of the ability, what more can you do?"

He seemed a little impressed.

"Well creatures die if you send enough voltage right into their brains sooo if I can get to touch their head, I can just kill them that way."

"Switching them off is quite good yes, what else?"

Switching them off? This guy used way too many terms, I never imagined creatures to use. But that was fun, seeing this guy say stuff like this was grounding, it just made my situation more believable.

I looked forward to this partnership and friendship. 

"Speed is quite high? My body is able to accelerate to really high speeds but its not as fast as real lightning."

Dragoon started laughing.

"Did you really think you could travel at near light speed just because you turned into lightning?"

"Was I wrong?"

"Very. I'll explain that after you finish up with this,"

"I have tried sending electricity into my body to see if I could kind of remotely control it... but I have not found any success."

The dragon did a little twirl in the sky and nodded his head like he was thinking, "Possible, quite possible. But you do not have that level of control and until you do, do not and I truly mean this, do not try it. Worst case scenario you could just fry your neural connections. That means you could lose the ability to think and just become a vegetable. Or you could lose control of your body and be permanently trapped inside never to be let out for the rest of your life suffering from the greatest form of helplessness possible."

Woah did he just almost give me an existential crisis?

"Or you could just die."

I just blinked in response not knowing how to physically respond to that. He had thrown me out on a loop on that one for sure.

Anyway, I wouldn't be shocking myself anytime soon and hopefully for the foreseeable future.

"And that's about it, so yeah....." I completed explaining my current move set.

"No it isn't. You missed out something."

Oh yeah I did.

"I can use lightning to melt most metals, it is quite efficient in that aspect."

"Oh! That is nice but that wasn't what I meant?" He said in a questioning tone.

"I don't think I have anything else I can use in combat though."

"Didn't you shoot an object at me using your little homemade railgun?"

Why had he asked about that? It failed. It was an experimental idea in the first place and after its failure I just gave up on it.

There was no use in following a thread which didn't lead to anything.

"Yeah I can magnetize metals and do that but its not effective at all.... I mean the nail didn't even reach you."

"It didn't reach me because I didn't want it to reach me Stryke. The ability itself? Pretty good, serious firepower. Shame you didn't have something strong enough to shoot out of it though. Even then I don't think it would have reached me. But yeah that is pretty good."

It seemed I had been quick to disregard this line of thought. It did break the sound barrier and seemed to be extremely explosive. And apparently it only failed because Dragoon's telekinesis had stopped it.

I also arrived at the conclusion that Dragoon's Waking was telekinesis. Moving things with his mind and now stopping my nail, it all lined up with standard telekinetic abilities.

"Maybe if he used Null instead....." Dragoon mused jerking me out of my thoughts.

"What?"

"Nothing.... So that is everything?"

"Yeah."

 "Okay then let's start your training. But first tell me everything you know about the Waking. I want to see if you know any of the basics at all."

For someone I found to quite carefree, Dragoon was surprisingly meticulous. 

"I... only asked this so I can determine a starting point for us to start from." Dragoon defended himself seeing how I didn't reply immediately.

"Ah no no. I was just thinking. Its fine." I replied immediately. I didn't want him to feel bad. "Yeah...um so the Cosmic Radiance happened and living creatures started evolving and some of them started awakening special powers not common to their race and that was classified as The Waking."

"Hmmm." He seemed deep in thought. 

"Well, we have to start from the very beginning then. You don't have nearly enough information on why everything is the way it is."

Huh? Wasn't this practically everything? What more did he want in reply?

WHOOOOOOSHH

Dragoon moved back into the cave and carried me alongside him.

I looked at him questioningly as we made our way back to the pond/lake in the cave. 

"Mood." He said as if it answered everything.

My annoyance for this guy went up a notch. If he wanted to do this from the start why did we go outside. That place was for physical training.

No..... no

I was not going to get hooked up on that again.

He then landed on the other side of the lake and assumed a deeper voice, one a little more gravelly than usual.

He seemed to fully set in creating this 'mood'.

"The reasons for the Cosmic Radiance is not really known," He started. "Theories for it exist, like it is the result of a sun collapsing on itself or that a creature of incomprehensible proportions did this but that doesn't really matter. The Cosmic Radiance happened and with it came a lot of changes. Now, the Cosmic Radiance brought widespread evolution and chances for awakening. Why is that? What led to this change?"

I fell into contemplation. I had never really questioned why the changes occurred and just chalked it up to The Cosmic Radiance.

"You see... The Cosmic Radiance brought a certain particles with it and just dropped it off at our planet. This particle has been named FEM or Forced Evolution Module. And it is due to this particle that the planet itself evolved. Everything experienced changes due to this not just living creatures. Humans also changed. Pre-FEM humans weren't exactly as strong or durable and post-FEM humans were a lot more sturdy. But that wasn't all, The Waking happened. This was due to absorption of excessive FEM by creatures and almost all humans eventually attain the status of The Waking due to high levels of absorption, that was the trade-off for not having enough in the actual evolution department. That covers the basic history." he concluded dropping the very revealing information.

I needed some time to digest this. This was not really taught to us and this information was not available either. So, the Cosmic Radiance had more scientifical significance than a magical one. Also, I wasn't expecting Dragoon to know this much, he even pulled out somewhat scientific terms. This was throwing me into a loop, whether creatures were that different from humans, I mean physically yeah, but mentally Dragoon was practically human and so was Maurice.... to an extent.

"Now lets get to The Waking." Dragoon continued after letting me ruminate over the previous information. "Everything that is a Waking has some sort of ability. These abilities are widely classified into three major types. Modification, Materialization and lastly Physicals. But this classification is just elementary. A lot of the Waking have abilities that bleed into other categories as well. The prime example here is you. You exhibit abilities that fall into all three categories. So, do not go underestimating abilities that you may come across just because you believe they only belong to a single category. It might not be true and that makes all the difference in battle."

Thinking about it, I really did display properties of all three categories. This information changed my perspective a little. Going in all out wasn't really my style anyway so this information would just act as an added layer of safety.

"Now about how you use your abilities.. you are pretty good with it. The issue is that you aren't really fine tuning it and you are also suffering from a lack of information. Lets tackle the first issue, why your ability isn't allowing you to travel at near light speed. Simple, it can't. You are a living creature and elemental lightning is not. It is a force of nature that follows the rules it has set. As long as you remain 'human' you cannot reach that level of speed. " 

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Manager here, yeah so back to normal schedule. Also allow the information dumps and no battle chapters, its kinda necessary set up stuff.

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