บท 8: Training the Gang
(Two more weeks, huh?)
Eo put his head on the desk. The boring lecture continued in the background. Eo started circulating his essence inside him out of boredom.
Normally for other people this would be an intense focusing period, but for Eo he had done this so many times with his superior technique that he didn't even feel fatigued anymore. He had to do it for perhaps a whole hour before he would notice anything different.
Eo opened and closed his hands. Strands of essence jumped from one finger to another. Most of the time it dissipated into the air. Eo tried doing it again but with thought-gel to insulate it.
He couldn't concentrate and some fell on his pants. Eo quickly soaked it back up through his leg as a mentor walked closer. Honestly, it was going to be weird trying to explain to a mentor why a "certain original essence training technique" looked like he had just peed himself. Eo pulled his chair further into his desk to hide the stain.
After math lessons involving stamina vs essence output, Eo became restless again. He tried purifying his thought-gel even more. At his previous peak he was able to remove about 80% of the essence from the essence-gel to make the thought-gel, but that 20% remaining always caused problems. It would alter the properties of the thought-gel enough so that he would always have to compensate for errors when trying to manipulate his thought-gel.
A mentor spotted him holding something slimy and walked up behind Eo.
"EO. ARE YOU PLAYING WITH GOO?!"
Eo whipped around. Goo?? Eo looked down, and then back at the mentor.
"Yes ma'am, I'm very sorry."
The mentor narrowed her eyes.
"Come to the main office later. We need to discuss your problems with… focusing."
The mentor whipped around and spoke loudly.
"If only we had more model students like Kyros."
Kyros beamed. Eo could see some students laughing and agreeing.
Eo shrugged and put his head down. He could hear other students excitedly murmuring about the upcoming "field trip" - a purging of horde monsters in two weeks. The students were already forming teams within the class of about 50 or so Recruits.
Eo decided to group up with the Essov gang he led. He wasn't particularly enthusiastic about it; in fact, he had thought of it more of a pain to drag in other people. He wasn't that confident about his own power though, so he decided it was safer to bring more people.
After that class it was finally Essence Training. This was basically heaven for Eo.
There, most of the buzz from the students was again, about the upcoming trip. Eo met up with the rest of his "gang" and decided to personally train them.
Utaris' eyes widened.
"He's going to personally train us! Amazing!"
Lodan vigorously agreed.
"New boss is amazing!"
Eo first brought out his jar containing harmist: a liquidy substance containing particles that was highly sensitive to essence. Back then when he joined the academy, they had used the harmist divination test to determine everyone's affinities. Though it was very cheap, it couldn't detect more than one affinity accurately, which was the reason why Kyros was given a divination test through the Grand Divinator Orb.
Eo had initially doubted his harmist divination when he joined, so he had bought his own harmist jar to test on himself. Unbeknownst to him, his was of much cheaper, diluted quality so the effects were much fainter than the Academy-grade harmist. He had frantically trained his essence until he could reproduce the effects on the weaker harmist from what he had remembered from the divination test. That was his first step into the crazy training he had thrust himself into, and the first step into taking the initiative ahead of the others in his class. Eo didn't tell his gang that the harmist he used was of lower quality.
"Everyone. Remember how the divination test looked like?"
The Essov squad nodded.
"Try reproducing it on here. You'll see that your essence, surprisingly, has degraded considerably."
The Essov squad looked at each other in horror. Jimean immediately grabbed the jar and tried harmonizing his essence through the harmist. The particles suspended in the harmist barely clumped together in contrast to Jimean's previous memory of it rapidly solidifying (indicating he had an earth affinity). Jimean's hands shook.
"H-how can this be…"
Eo laughed. He then put his hands on it and demonstrated what his supposed divination result looked like, which was dozens of tendrils of particles lining up, and forming a thick metallic sheen on the surface.
"All of you should now place your hands on it. The winner is the one who manages to show only their affinity. Now, PRACTICE!"
This was an especially convenient challenge for Eo, as everyone in the Essov squad had a different element. Eo had metal, Utaris had heat, Wifjad had air, Lodan had sound, and Jimean had earth.
The former Red Jacket gang fought furiously for dominance without realizing that completely muting the other people's essences was practically impossible. Eo chuckled.
Two weeks was going to be a long time.
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