Grade

table test

Within the next hour, as the sunrise showed itself, blood pooled from within several hundred wounds that emerged from Evan's face and body. The dry ice sealing all of his wounds from over a decade, melted away due to his depleted mana, and he bled out and perished.
The luster on his entire being washed away, replaced with either a dull pale, or crimson stains.
He couldn't have foreseen this coming, it was his first time being fully drained of mana.

His face was calm. He at least died painlessly.

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Evan winced as the vicinity got brighter due to a campfire lit. He could feel it, tiny holes peering into the thin layer of ice armor around his right boot. A hint of sparkling smoke, pouring downward.
"It is warm..." Evan affirmed to himself. He scooted over, moving slowly with his left arm and legs, facing upward like an upside-down spider, then let out a soft, pained breath as he settled just beside but not too close to Athena and her thigh-pillow Louise, intent on using them as heat shields against the treacherous warmth of the campfire.

Something ticked him off. A different spot of heat on the opposite side, his left side. Evan glanced at it, and it was truly so. Jonas Delving's partizan, stuck in the outer wall of the compound.
Thinking about it, was that what injured Jazdia?
"Athena... You also use spears... right?" Evan glanced at her, while pointing at the black-gold weapon with his left hand.

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"True..."
Evan winced, turning to sit facing the same way as Athena. He sighed. These damn ribs. "You are not really in... immediate danger."
He slowly slumped back, and lay back onto the grass. It seemed it didn't hurt for him as much to breathe deeply in this position, and so he took a deep breath.
"Healing magic... I do not really understand, the entire concept of magic... How they all vary in what they can do... or the ways they are acquired..."
Evan turned his head and barely looked "down" towards Athena. It's difficult in this angle without having to tilt his head up. "Have you ever taught anyone else, how to make purple fire?"

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"Medicine... what is that?" Evan replied, definitely instilling confidence towards his offer.
His eyes glowed gold for a moment, as thin hairlike strands of ice emerge from his hand. They hover towards specifc spots on the arm, their ends pointed down like needles.
"I am going to... manually piece your bones back together... then clean up and stitch this," Evan weakly gestured over the leather cuts, "this thing."
This sleeve cloth is in the way. Maybe it should be cut out, at the same time as the leather straps?
"It is going to be cold... and it will hurt... but the cold should reduce the pain... maybe."
Evan stared at the arm, instilling in himself the process and the order in which to do it. He wouldn't notice Athena doing any head movement if she did so.
"Then... we will wrap your arm in a cocoon... and wait for the bones to heal thems... themselves." He wasn't entirely sure how long. He usually just analyzed his own injury and didn't keep track of the days.
Didn't keep track of any day. Did not have a birth date.

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"We might be... similar."
Evan knelt, beginning to stand up, right arm still in his coat pocket. He took a deep breath, and winced. Clutched the right side of his torso. "I have been wielding ice s... since I can remember."
He stood up, let out a sigh, and began walking towards and around Athena. "Sorry... My ribs..."
Then, he slowly knelt on one leg, near Athena's left side. "I am fine... compared to this."
It was difficult to ignore. Athena's left arm was in absolute shambles. Aside from the multiple fractures he could see from the blood in her bones, there were also these gruesome cuts from leather straps tearing through her flesh.
"I have not yet fixed an... an arm that was not my own... It does not inst... instill confidence, I guess."
Every pause, burdened by laborious breath. A short chuckle at the end of the last sentence, followed by a wince. He hesitantly hovered his left hand above Athena's left arm.
"But... please let me..."

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dream

In the moment of his collapse, it felt like Evan was spun upside-down along with the world he was in. He stood up, disoriented, yet oddly not feeling pain from his supposedly crushed ribs. It looked like he was still in the woman Stritzel's compound, and every trace of the battle in the outer courtyard was still there. The broken gates. The scattered pieces of ice. Arrow shafts. A spear stuck in the wall. Yet there's more. The compound, in fact the entire world, was crumbling gradually. Its pieces floated wherever, and the sickly, cloudy grey-blue sky was littered with rocks and foliage.
No one else was there, just Evan in his lonesome... wait, no. By the outer gate. Two men dressed differently, but with the same face and height as Evan. He walked closer, to listen to what they're talking about.
"Hey. Why do you let your dimension look this drab?"
"It is beyond my control, how this world looks."
"Lame. Oh hey, he's awake now, isn't he?"
The Evan lookalike but with black hair, amber eyes and ultra-stylish black formal clothes, turned from his seat, a giant hand made of dry ice. "Yo. Nice power you've got there. My name's Grade, by the way."
"We are all "Grade", Granfalloon."
"Agh, damn it! Even if that's my real name, I won't use it! It's such a mouthful, and why does it sound like grandpa!? You're lucky you have a two-letter name, "Id"."
The silver-haired man with modest robes and pitch-black eyes smiled, and then didn't. His eyes looked overflowing with miasma, staring at the blank horizon outside the compound's gate. "Evan. You nearly died. This will not do. Hence, I deliver someone to help overcome your inexperience."
"Me? Hey, I don't do battles, much less magical ones. How am I supposed to help him?"
"It is true that you do not seek fights yourself, but for those fights that came to you, you always won them."
"It doesn't count if you're cheating..." Grade sighed, then glanced at Evan. "Well, whatever. I do have something to say to you, kid."
Grade summoned in his hand what seemed like a flintlock, but it was also a revolver, and its chamber glowed a bluish-white. "You're too earnest." He shot Evan with it. It bounced off him as he blocked with his arm, but the force was still tremendous that it pushed his upper body back. In retaliation, he hastily hurled a giant ice knife at Grade. He shot it twice to break most of it, then hook-kicked the handle away. He tried to shoot at Evan, but the gun seemed jammed, so he threw it away and summoned another one.
It was a trick. The thrown gun exploded as it hit the ground, sending its last round towards Evan's unguarded forehead, knocking him down on his back. Grade was already atop him, gun pointed at his face. "You lack deception."
"Grade, version 718114. Granfalloon. Within the million of us, those with a higher number usually have greater power. My version is merely 94. With my only ability, I delay my death by existing in the one place where no one dies. Within dreams."
"Eh... I don't like talkling about it, but I do have several powers." Grade started counting with his fingers. "Dragon's blood coursing through my body, near-unkillable. Dragon's eye, I can see mana, zoom at any distance. Precognition. Item summoning. Stealing others' mana by touch, that's a really common one, actually. And there was another..."
A tinge of sadness as he thought of the last one. He shook his head. "In theory, there was no limit to the duration of the future I can see, or the power of the item I can summon, but I was defective. I didn't start with immense pools of mana like all of you. And since I majorly refused to fight all my life, it never had a chance to grow. There came a time when... something tragic happened that I couldn't foresee, and I died along with everybody I hold dear. With it, I discovered my sixth power."
A horde of grey humonculi sprouted out of the ground. Grade himself shot one of them as demonstration, tearing a hole through its head. It regenerated just as quickly as it was damaged. "This... power, that supposedly grew with the number of people I've killed." He aimed the gun back at Evan.
"Explore your powers and their limits, before you end up dead like me. You get that?" Grade leaned to aim closer, between Evan's eyes.
Evan nods. "I understand... Thank you. Granfalloon."
Grade lets out a toothy grin and chuckles. "Don't call me that name." He shoots Evan point-blank between the eyes.

---

Evan's eyes jolted open as if awoken by a nightmare, just before Louise approached and called her name.
He pushed up with his left elbow -- really, his only usable arm, and turned his head to glance at Louise and Athena. He gave the grass a dejected look, then fully turned and sat with his left knee up and his left arm atop it. He winced, getting up to that position.
"C... call me Evan."
This has been around the third time he's had to say it, and there will seem to be many more incoming. He's just not used to the whole baron thing.
"Hello... Athena." Evan waved at her with his left hand. There's an attempt at a smile underneath that tall scarf.
"How do you make... purple fire?" Straightforward as usual.

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Dragging the oversized knife around the anti-magic field. Evan walked, laboriously. He's so clearly short of breath, and it hurt to take a deep breath of air. He was extremely tired.
Soon, this concave field of frost around him turned into a full circle as Jonas' sanctuary waned. Evan watched as Jonas' entire arm gets cut clean off.
Evan had conflicting emotions. A little schadenfreude at the deed, but annoyed that he wasn't the one doing it. In fact he wasn't sure if he ever landed a clean hit on Jonas.
There's so little in his understanding of mana and magic. Everything about it frustrated him. His mana surges out, freezing the nearby grass into fragile shards of ice, as the oversized knife he's been lugging for a while now just fully darted back then swung itself at an extremely high arc, hurling itself to slice through or crash onto the two remaining thugs that remained frozen even as the anti-magic field dissipated.

This mana thing. He seemed fully out of it, and he only had a few more seconds of his Blood Sight active, to watch Jazdia walk near. Blood dripping from her belly, through her torn liver, and down to her lower body. Evan raised his left hand, showing long hair-like ice strands emerge from his fingers.
"Do you need..." Evan's vision dropped about two feet as he was suddenly down to his left knee. "help..." His hand reached for the ground for stability but it was a little too low down, until it rapidly wasn't.
Thud. He fell to his side. Fully out of it.
A mixture of pain, bottomed-out mana, and the feeling of a lack of air.

The sharp pain of someone trying to move his body would surely wake him up again, though.

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Evan was not one to make noises when hurt.
He always kept his sufferings for himself, but this... this was one of the worst ones. Even considering it against the time he had a multitude of clawed gashes that had to be sewn shut, which led to the idea of his ice armor to begin with. Though, it seems he just traded open-flesh bleeding wounds for immense blunt force trauma.
A silver lining, if any... was that even Jonas couldn't slice through this armor. It came as a shock to Evan, too.

It hurt to breathe. Damn broken ribs. He couldn't even conjure ice to alleviate the pain. He slowly pushed off the ground, and as he was up on two feet, another explosion. Seems like Jazdia has no problems using magic that far out.
At the corner of his eye, another enraged thug charged towards Jonas and the three women surrounding him, but suddenly stopped. Abnormal. Completely frozen. Two other thugs shared a same fate in the far distance.
There seemed to be a distinct edge to this interferent sanctuary.

He groaned, undislocating his right elbow, and placed his right arm into his right coat pocket with his left hand, then clutched his aching broken ribs and briskly walked towards and past the frozen thug south of him. The grass around him froze, and he was a little more relieved that his power stayed.
A relief immediately replaced by more pain as he molded a wide tightening band around his chest to lessen the movement of his ribs.
In his anger, he conjured a... a sword? That didn't work the last time. Damn it, he'd been taking it easy on these thugs since the first one he accidentally killed.
Dig deep. Stop hesitating. The way these creatures act, it's debatable if they're even alive.

He conjured what could only be described as an oversized knife, taller than even himself, and definitely proportional to a knife in its blade's immensely thick and wide shape compared to the rest of it. It'd take too long to harden the entire thing, so he only hardened the sharp edge, plus a reinforcing web of steel-ice strands within to keep the entire structure intact even if it broke.
It was a mistake to have stuck to using those tiny, measly weapons this entire time, when he had as much ease controlling much bigger weapons.
The oversized knife rose up and then dove, slicing down on the vulnerably frozen thug at the edge of the magic-interfering field. Surely this much weight would crush the thug's entire body even if it didn't slice through. Gotta pulverize it just to be sure, it's not like it could move to retaliate.

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Evan flinched and braced with his right arm to cover his face. He had to turn off his blood-seeing eyes due to the sheer amount of light that exuded from that old man's being.
Amidst this light, Evan's entire being sparkled like an unfurled bag of diamonds. Foolish, he felt to come at this creature of pure mana with just his half-assed attacks. No longer.
He ran towards the old man Jonas Delving to close the gap. As he did, Jonas threw his partizan way up and an explosion seemed to have happened far behind him, but he cared not for it. As he reached within range and still ran, he positioned his arms, mimicking the motion of crushing an orb-like shape with his bare hands.
Within the full singular second of him creating this motion, three enormous objects emerged.
An enormous hand of ice behind Jonas, aiming to clasp behind him and hold him in place.
Another enormous hand shaped into a fist just off to Evan's side, surging towards Jonas and set to impact exactly one second since its creation where it's at its maximum size.
A third hand shaped into a chop, taking a more diagonal downward route to flank Jonas' right side as it emerges several meters off the ground, set to impact at the same time as the fist.
Each ice structure had a volume of around 1m³, each weighing about 1.6 tons, and looking sharp and jagged in their structure due to Evan's internal rage from being possibly, severely outmatched.

The warg and his victim continue their struggles, having each other's limbs inside each other's mouths. It mustered all the might in its jaw to pierce through the arm and split it in twane, otherwise continuing to absorb the mana that fueled the thug. Nothing really changed.

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Evan staggered, feeling just a little of the blunt force that remained from that negated slash. The thug grabbed his coat, smoke pouring down from its heated hand melting the outermost layer of his thin ice armor, while Yvonne charged in attempting to crush its skull by the temple.
Evan nodded in response to Yvonne, but not sure if she saw that. He tapped his chest, and two of the three warstaves attached to his back ejected, one of them turning a little distance away before it darted full-force towards the other side of the thug's skull, to either amplify Yvonne's assault or crush the skull by itself.
The other warstaff took a curved beeline to pierce through the old Delving's head from his right side, timing itself with Athena's fiery attack. The escaped warg too attacked at the same time from behind Delving, biting at his magic shield or his left arm to devour his mana and, in the case of the arm, try to dissuade any movement from that limb.

The warg that stayed was fully ensnared. His front leg trapped, his throat assaulted by a searing hand. A gargled noise came out before its jaw clamped at the arm, biding time and trying to heal off of whatever mana is giving these creatures power.
It'll try to kick the other thug away with its hind legs, if it comes close.