Why did someone like him express such a desire to fight? Someone that didn’t even wield an ounce of mana while swinging their weapon?

I drew my aether into my arms, using regular mana to augment my speed.

The titan’s right arm began to swing towards him, threatening to completely crush the left side of his body.

Positioning myself directly in the striking arm’s collision course, I braced for impact.

“Hngh!”

It felt as if every bone in my body rattled upon taking the brunt of the titan’s momentum, my feet sliding back against the dirt as I tried to prevent myself from losing any more ground.

“Hah! So you’ve decided to stay and fight after all!”

“Are you crazy?! Are you trying to get yourself killed here?!”

“Nah, I’m not old enough for that yet. I just needed to get you back out here on the battlefield, that’s all.”

“What?”

Without answering my question, he swung his axe into the crevice formed by the previous blows, producing a horrendous cracking sound as the titan’s lower leg became severed from its body.

The titan shrieked in pain, lashing out its tendrils towards the both of us.

Letting go of its arm, I dove towards the man and quickly yanked him out of harm’s way, his fingers being forced to slide along and eventually let go of his axe’s handle.

“Man, I just got that axe too.” 

“That’s what you’re worried about?!”

Just like the chimera beast from before, the titan began surrounding itself in a petrified cage of its own tendrils. I glimpsed it desperately trying to heal its leg just before the bars of this cage completely obscured my view.

“We’ve got a bit of time now. I sensed it during those few seconds of fighting– You can see it, can’t you?”

“See what?”

There was only one thing during that fight I saw that stood out to me, but to go about sharing my abilities all willy nilly would be unwise.

“That energy at the center of every being. ‘Spirit energy,’ as some call it, ‘Divine energy,’ as it's called by the religious followers down south, or ‘Ki,’ in the clans of Occidentalis to the west.”

Was he referring to aether? If so, why didn’t he mention that as one of its supposed many names?

Seika had told me that only shardbearers could properly utilize it due to the drawbacks of drawing from a person’s own aether, so how was it that this guy was so aware of it? Moreover, the fact that it had multiple names based on the locale meant other people were using it as well–

“Well? Can you see it or not?”

I’d have to ask Seika when I got the chance.

“Yeah, I was just recently able to see it. What about it?”

“So you’ve reached that stage then… Tell me, kid, what’re your dreams and goals?”

“Huh? What’s that got to do with–”

“There’s not much time,” he urged, pointing at the slowly unraveling cage around the titan, “so just answer the question.”

“I…”

I didn’t really know myself. To save people..? Could that be it? But no, I wasn’t an impartial hero– I really only cared to protect those dear to me… but at the same time, I’d like to believe I fought for the greater good–

“...don’t know.”

“A rather quick answer, aside from some thinking, and an honest one at that. I’m starting to like you more and more”

“Uh– thank you..?”

“Let me guess. I suppose you once had a childhood dream to protect everything you loved, no?”

Could this guy read minds?? I could feel my cheeks growing flushed.

“Don’t fret, everything will be explained to you eventually. For now, that’s all I need to know to get started”

He suddenly gave my back a heavy slap, forcing my body to stumble forwards. At the same time, he broke into a sprint, heading directly towards the beast. 

There was nothing to do but follow him.

“I want you to cut off all your senses.”

“What?!”

“Stop listening, stop feeling, stop seeing, stop smelling. Only focus on the concentration of my spirit energy beside you.”

In comparison to everything else going on around us, his aether was rather faint, yet I was supposed to somehow use that as my only compass?

For whatever reason, I felt compelled to listen– some persuasive tone of knowledge that rolled off his tongue.

I heeded his words, removing myself from as many sensations as I could while still running forth. In the darkness, the warmth grew stronger.

A faint light amidst vivid background transformed into a blazing sphere against the darkness. I could now clearly discern its color– a warm, embracing yellow.

As I continued to focus, his aether continued to grow in its presence, stretching out into five elongated appendages that I quickly realized represented his limbs and head. Their movements appeared to perfectly mimic what I assumed were the motions of his physical body.

When he asked if I could see ‘it’, was this the true vision he intended for me to see?

I tried directing my focus at the enemy ahead but immediately felt a splitting pain stab through my head.

I opened my eyes in shock.

“You’ve finally opened your eyes again. What you just saw is the ‘true nature’ of corrupted energy.”

His explanation certainly aligned with what I just saw moments before. There was an indescribable, indecipherable mass of crimson energy. It didn’t branch out into a body like a human’s aether– no– it oozed and aerated in agonizing threads that seemed desperate to break free from its own existence.

“It appears you’re more sensitive to these sorts of things than most folk. Even I can handle looking at it, although it is most definitely unpleasant… Now, I want you to focus on my aether as we fight, read them as if they were lines of a data log.”

I had no time to try to figure out what exactly he wanted me to do.

The titan’s cage finally unraveled itself, lashing out once more in our direction.

If this ‘reading’ referred to predicting movements based on aether, then he was able to do so perfectly, even against the abomination that was corrupted energy.

Physically, his movements simply appeared sloppy, yet now that I could overlay the motions of his aether with his physical body, it became ever so clear that those ‘errors’ were actually immediate reactions to his target’s own actions.

It was now no wonder how he emerged from the first round of fighting without a single scratch.

I followed close behind, occasionally having to use some tendrils as footholds to launch myself aside routes that man could simply cut through.

At last he returned to before the titan’s feet, effortlessly removing his axe still lodged in its leg to reopen the just-healed wound.

The titan staggered a bit, yet now seemed impervious to the damage.

“Now, watch this!”

The yellow hue of his aether traveled through his arms and to the tip of the axe, bathing it in the same light that resided within himself.

With another swing, he cleaved through the titan’s leg again as it fell over while swinging at him.

I similarly enveloped my arm in my own aether and struck at its arm midair, pushing it back further as it toppled over.

I found it somewhat amusing how someone else’s lessons could make my own essence be more familiar to myself.

The titan had seemed to have learned itself, no longer prioritizing a perfectly healed state and instead adapted to fighting in its fallen position. Using one arm to push itself up, it swept the other across the ground, scattering a smokescreen of dirt as it trailed after our figures.

“Circle behind it and pay attention to my spirit energy!”

I obeyed once more, masking my presence in the dirt and weaving between stray tendrils that searched for our locations.

Suddenly, I witnessed his presence flare up, so much so that he seemed to exude a radiating aura of pure aether. 

Its appearance was far more majestic than any ordinary aura I’d seen before– a perfected stage 1 that only fueled itself with aether.

The energy made an intonation of a horizontal swing, but no, his hand opened wide just before reaching the end of the motion.

He was throwing the axe.

The yellow hue quickly began fading as soon as it left its grasp, slicing past the titan’s right shoulder joint and quickly rendering that arm unusable.

The axe was too high for me to catch and I was quickly losing sight of the aether inhabiting it.

Amidst the dust, I opened my eyes and leapt to the air. There it was, right before my eyes.

I outstretched my right arm and firmly grasped the handle, channeling my own aether through the weapon as I’d seen him do before. 

“Finish it!”

Unable to use its right arm, the titan forced itself to awkwardly spin its body from its half-kneeling position in an attempt to strike me with the left.

Doing so granted me a clear path to its core at the approaching front of its torso.

Stage 0 - Aetherflow, Maximum Output

With every fiber in my arms and chest, I twisted my body to rotate myself alongside the axe with tremendous force.

Once, two, three rotations– then, Krrrshk!

The axe cleaved cleanly through the core and down its body as the titan froze for just a moment.

I released the axe from my grasp and formed a fist, channeling every last drop of aether from my body into my right hand.

“Hah, this very scene played out when I defeated the titan the first time around,” I thought. 

BAM! I felt the core shatter to pieces against my knuckles.

As the dirt settled from the air, I could see the man smiling with pride, as if to say, “I taught him that!”

Only, there was one issue that now faced me.

The titan, a gaping hole punctured through its chest, still towered before me, its body unmoving as if dead, yet refusing to vanish.

I returned my gaze to the man, whose eyes now seemed distant and distracted.

Following his eyes, off in the distance, I glimpsed the remainder of the guard troop.

Two guards left standing, the rest, skewered atop tendrils like animals atop stakes.

The other volunteer workers rushed towards them with axes in hand.

The captain– his head pierced through by a stake that protruded out through his forehead– limply hanging from the titan’s elongated hand as blood dripped from his mouth.

The titan– standing as if frozen in time, two cores in its chest, two heads dividing its neck.