Eira lowered her stick and rubbed her shoulder, wincing slightly where Clyde's hit had landed.
"Okay, I'm done for today," she said. "I'm going to sit before he talks me into another sparring round."
"Coward," Aurelian said, grinning.
"It's called strategic Aurelian," she said, already walking toward the bench. "And there's a difference."
"Is there?"
"There is when I'm the one saying it." She sat, pulled her knees up, closed her eyes. "Wake me up if anything actually interesting happens."
"Everything I do is interesting."
"That's not what I said."
Aurelian laughed and turned back to Clyde, rolling his shoulders out.
"Alright. Sparring's done. Let me teach you something that's actually going to save your life."
"I thought the sparring was the useful part."
"Nah, that was the warm-up, this is the real thing."
He walked toward the center of the hall, where moonlight poured down through a gap in the ceiling. Shallow grooves ran across the surface, crossing each other in places, faint light moving through them like something just under the skin.
"Alright before we begin, do you know what a Moon Cage is?"
"I have heard the name before, but never made one."Clyde said.
"Good, at least you're honest about it. Most people think it's just you shoving your Lunar ichor out and hope it sticks somewhere. That's not control, that's just throwing things at a wall."
"So what is it actually?"
"Arrangement." He held up one hand, fingers spread wide like he was about to count something. "Your Lunar Ichor moves like a wave. You compress that wave down until it turns into something more like a particle. Then you line those particles up. Get enough of them lined up right and they form a lattice. That lattice is your Cage."
"So I'm not just pushing ichor out randomly. I'm compressing it and building something with it."
"Yes! Exactly that." Aurelian pointed at him like he'd just won something. "See, this is why I like teaching you. Most people need me to say that four different ways before it lands."
"How many ways did you say it just now?"
"One, maybe one and a half, but I feel like I'm getting better at this."
This guy is truly shameless, Clyde thought.
Clyde let his ichor rise slowly, careful, spreading just past his skin in a thin layer. As he slowly senses his lunar ichor waves turning into particles. The air in front of him thickened unevenly. When he tried arranging it parts of it held its shape, while the rest just slid right through. It's like trying to grab water with his bare hands.
Aurelian watched, arms crossed. "Feel that wobble?"
"Yeah, it won't sit still."
"That's the problem. You're trying to arrange things you can barely feel. You're going off instinct, and instinct isn't precise enough for this."
Clyde adjusted on instinct by tightening one spot, and loosening another. It got a little better. Until small errors kept popping up again, each one adding a bit more drag.
"Feels like it wants to fall apart," Clyde said.
"It will fall apart eventually, if you don't adjust it right"
Wait what if I just use the Hollow Eyes, that way I can actually see the particles instead of guessing where they are.
His eyes shift into a deep violet like color with a horizontal infinity symbol forming at their center, a four-pointed star nested inside it, a constellation with twelve different symbols of human emotion slowly forming around the whole iris.
The world in his perspective sharpened.
The air wasn't empty space anymore, he could actually see the particles now, the tiny gaps between them, the way they kept drifting even when they looked still from the outside. What had felt abstract and slippery a moment ago finally had a shape he could look at directly.
He adjusted again, with the particles visible, the correction came almost instantly — compression tightened, the particles packed closer, snapping into a clean repeating pattern that held without him having to constantly force it.
Aurelian raised an eyebrow, then he let out a low whistle.
"You seem to figure that out by yourself." He said with confidence. "Seems like I am not the only genius here, well I guess it's because of my amazing teaching skills" And he continues his yap.....
Clyde looks at him in disbelief with a slight hint of disgust he thought, is he mentally insane? Does this guy not feel embarrassed? Oh, wait shouldn't I be the one embarrassed here?
Clyde hurriedly looks left and right and after seeing no one is spying on him, he sighs in relief. Phew... I'm safe, no one saw me talking to a mentally insane person.
Seeing Clyde's zoned out posture, Aurelian decided to flick him in the head.
"Why did you zoned out so suddenly?"
"Oh, I was uhh… thinking about something and what were you saying just now?"
"Ehem, I said your special, well not really in a way I could explain it. To put it simply, you have an amazing problem solving skill."
Noxar said the same thing too.
"What made you think of that?"
"Most people wait for someone to tell them."Aurelian grinned. "And it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure that one out. Don't ask how long."
"How long?"
"I said don't ask."
Aurelian's grin widened. "Alright Now I want you to try and change it."
"Change it how?"
"You know the particles you packed together? Pick one section and crowd it even tighter than the rest, until it's as thin as a sheet of paper "
Clyde focused on one side of the structure and pushed the particles closer together. They crowded in, packed so tight the air around that section stopped giving way at all.
"That's the start of a Moon Barrier," Aurelian said. "Its basically the same idea, but in a different shape. A Cage holds something in by surrounding it on every side. A barrier is flatter and more dense. You take that same crowded lattice and thin it out, stretch it into something more like a sheet of paper instead of a box."
"A sheet."
"Yeah. Thin, but packed so tight nothing physical gets through it. Stops blades, stops most spells too, since spells still have to physically interact with something to land." He held up a hand. "Doesn't stop everything, though. Anything that messes with your head directly — mental stuff, illusions, that sort of thing — walks straight through a Barrier like it's not even there. The lattice only blocks things that have to physically touch you to work."
Clyde thinned the structure out, stretching the dense section into a flat plane in front of him. It held, rigid despite how thin it looked.
"Good," Aurelian said. "Now do it again. And again after that."
"How many times?"
"Until it stops feeling like a spell and starts feeling like a habit." He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, looking far too pleased with himself for someone who wasn't doing any of the actual work. "Here's the part nobody likes hearing, but it's true — every time you do this, it gets easier. Not because you're trying harder. Your wave's just finding the same shape over and over, and eventually it remembers the shape on its own."
"That's the recalibration thing Soren mentioned."
"Yeah, exactly that. Recalibration point. Once you hit it, this stuff stops taking effort. You think 'Cage' and it's already half-built before you've even finished deciding to do it." He shrugged. "I'm there with most of my stuff now. Drives Eira a little crazy. She still has to actually concentrate for things I do without thinking about it at all."
"She doesn't seem like the jealous type."
"She'd never say it out loud. But I can tell." He said it with so much obvious affection it didn't even sound like teasing. "Anyway, again."
Clyde formed the Cage again, faster this time, then the barrier, then back to the cage, then thinned a different section into a second Barrier while the first one was still holding, just to see if he could.