"What's with the look?" she asked as she levered herself to her feet.

"Even considering you have a Mana Physique, and your impressive Presence control, you are quite strong for somebody on only rebirth six," he explained calmly. "Your perseverance, as well, is absolutely nothing to sneeze at. I know people quite a few rebirths higher, though not necessarily all of them stronger, who wouldn't have held up as well as you did."

"Can I ask something?" Beth asked.

"Besides that?" he replied with a grin. "Sure. If it's a secret, I just won't answer."

"Well, it's personal," Beth said, patting Sera to reassure the girl she was fine as the dragon checked her over.

"Go ahead," Zane said.

"How high are your weaponskills, if you don't mind me asking that?" Beth asked.

"Well, I won't say all," he said. "I have quite a few; I get bored, you see. As to what is what, you would be chiefly concerned with Unarmed, of which mine is just into Sage. Other of my weaponskills are greater or lesser, but that one is Sage[1] currently. What's more, I'll tell you it isn't really something I've trained extensively; when you've lived long enough and fought most of that time, you get pretty damned good at Unarmed just by being in so damned many fights that it becomes second nature at that point."

"Okay, thanks," Beth said with a nod. "I still have a long way to go, but it's good to get an idea. You didn't use any other skills, right?"

"Just really my battle experience," he said with a shrug. "With my stats, passive boosts from skills and other effects, and a few old tricks, I can keep up with most kids these days. I didn't really fully utilize my Unarmed, if you want the truth. I just have so much experience that I can read attack patterns and attacks with ease and react to them without any effort."

"Pretty incredible," Beth acknowledged with another nod, ceding the training stage to Sera.

"We'll rotate," Zane said.

"If we can even wake Blood up," Beth replied, poking at the wolf.

"Don't worry, we have plenty of time," he said, glancing around surreptitiously after saying so. "But don't let Fallon hear I've been talking about time."

"He doesn't like it?" Sera asked, summoning her spear.

"He never shuts up about it," Zane replied with a wave of his hand. "He knows everything about time, or thinks he does, and once he starts, he really doesn't stop. People call me long winded, but I can at least wrap the conversation up on the same day it started."

"Well, we don't have anything to do anyway," Beth said.

"We're under compressed time in here as well," Zane mentioned casually.

"Really?" Sera asked. "I can't even feel it."

"I did just say Fallon was a master of time," Zane retorted, staring at her with slightly narrowed eyes.

"True," Sera replied with a shrug.

"The three of you have held up to time compression surprisingly well," he commented as he got ready to battle Sera.

"What does that mean?" Beth asked.

Zane held out a hand and gestured Sera to start, easily dodging her opening salvo as he explained, "Time compression affects different people in different ways. All people find it a bit wearying, and usually need a few weeks or months of rest at certain points to recover from using it so much. The three of you, however, show none of the signs of time compression weariness, which would be expressing themselves most strongly in a time compressed space."

"This is the first I've heard about this," Beth said as she watched Sera and Zane fighting with her arms crossed.

"It's not made a big deal of," Zane said. "Mostly because very few spend so much time in time compression that it really begins to express itself. Wealthy scions, lucky bastards who hit it rich and can afford it, and those that have a very long time out in the field fighting and earning their keep. We see it in those kinds of folks, where they spend years in compressed time and start to get some level of time compression exhaustion. The three of you, however, show absolutely no signs of it. Not that everyone gets it, but the three of you are doing quite well, in that regard."

Beth just gave a shrug in regard to his explanation, watching as he basically demolished Sera without even looking like he was trying. He did much the same as he had with her, slowly moving faster and hitting harder until Sera was just unable to keep up. The way that he put the pressure on slowly caused the person to have to respond with an ever-increasing output of their own, not just pushing them to the limit, but also helping them see flaws in their own fighting techniques more easily.

Blood was next on the chopping block, Beth throwing her into the ring after Sera was done and stepped down to rest for a moment. The wolf was a bit of a surprise for the old man, as he had clearly not expected her to be quite so fast and agile, but her speed still didn't approach anywhere close to his. He just had to turn up the speed a bit more a bit earlier, but Blood was able to keep up with him for quite a long time. Rather than the brute force of Beth or the heavy endurance of Sera, Blood was all about speed, and getting to a point where she was overwhelmed meant getting to a point where she and Zane were little more than blurs to the other two. Even given that, Blood still had some impressive endurance and some impressive ability to fight through pain and even regenerate, so the very first spar took more than twenty-five minutes.

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"Speed is good," Zane commented, still looking as fresh as when he had teleported in front of them in the hallway. "Power is just a bit lacking."

"I have plenty of power," Blood grumbled.

"For someone of your age and overall training, sure, your power is decent," Zane said with a shrug. "But, compared to the real talents, the prodigies and the mad geniuses and the great, legendary experts out there, even the young ones…you're nothing special. You should be trying to improve every single facet of yourself, of course, and that includes everything you utilize in combat. Sure, you're fast, and sure, you have some power, but even compared to your speed, your striking power is somewhat lacking. Don't just focus on one thing, either, focus on everything. Don't listen to my advice and decide you need a single winning skill, even a weaponskill, and focus on that. Make everything better. Increase your humanization, increase your speed, get better with your skills and level them, increase your weaponskills, and look for any other advantage you can get."

"It sounds like a lot of work," Blood grumped.

"It is a lot of work, but it's one of the differences between stalling out somewhere in Ascended and pushing beyond that, even far beyond that," Zane replied lazily. "If you just want to live two or three thousand years and reach a certain level of power, that's more than fine. If you want to push beyond that, to reach heights even the strong can't imagine in their wildest of dreams, then you need to do more. You need to be more."

"Understood," Blood growled out, trying to leave the stage but being stopped by Beth.

"Let's do a round of all of us," Beth said, gesturing for Sera to get back up on the training stage as well.

"Sure," Zane said, sticking his hands in his pockets. "Just concentrate on trying to make your attacks as fast, sharp, and powerful as possible. Start whenever you're ready."

The three of them surrounded him and attacked as soon as he finished speaking, moving as fast as they could, knowing that there was absolutely no point in holding anything back. Zane, frustratingly enough, kept his hands in his pockets the whole time, dodging all their attacks with incredible ease. He made the whole spar look entirely effortless, pointing to a difference in both skill and battle experience that was shocking. The fight could have gone on for quite some time, but he did attack, both using kicks and with skills as he moved around. The skills were, to Beth, the most shocking part of the spar, as he manifested skills that she thought should be cast with an attacking motion or body part just from the air. It made her rethink a lot of things, to have his back turned to her while he was kicking Sera in the chest and have a beam of pure energy fire from the space around him right into her face. She thought about if she could do anything similar, and the only thing she could really work on without a lot of study would be Celestial Annihilation.

That was the first thing she tried, experimenting as they fought, not really concerned with winning as that wasn't even a distant dream. She first used the skill a few times to make sure she was used to it and was operating it in a fairly normal manner before she changed how she activated it. She fired out a strike from her fist, but the energy didn't come from her fist, instead appearing a few inches beyond her fist and shooting towards Zane, who easily and nimbly dodge the rapid strike. It might not sound like much, but even firing the attack out from those few inches off her skin was incredibly difficult and required a degree of concentration she would never have been able to achieve if this weren't training and Sera and Blood weren't taking most of Zane's attention.

She focused on that, firing out blasts from a little away from her skin. It was strange, as the energy still moved in the pattern of the skill, but there was an added complexity at the end that allowed the energy to manifest in the air near her instead of coming from her body or a weapon she was holding. And it was hard, too. She had to put most of her focus on doing it and even then a couple of the blasts, instead of being very focused beams of annihilation energy, turned into more shotgun explosions. Those were the ones that she tried to fire from further out, mimicking Zane before realizing the much more experienced man was doing tricks that were simply way above her group's current abilities with their skills. She focused for that whole fight on just using her fists and feet but firing the energy from further out, which helped get her a very good working understanding of the principle Zane was using.

She did note that the three of them were losing, however, and tried to add in more attacks at a higher frequency to compensate, but was a bit surprised when Zane altered his attack patterns just enough to included the changes in the level he was fighting at. Fighting harder drew a proportionate response from him, and that included his slowly turning up the heat over the course of the fight. That forced her to continue to fight even harder, trying not to cause them to lose too soon by ratcheting up Zane's pressure with her attacks and then falling short, which put them in a bit of a vicious cycle. The end came more swiftly this time, a bit ironically, because he fought them with the same level of power even when he knocked one of them out of the fight. He had managed to get Blood with a combination that she couldn't seem to dodge, switching to Sera briefly while avoiding Beth's attacks, but then was back on the lupine woman and hit her with an almost classical fist-fighting combo that both figuratively and literally knocked her out of the ring.

After that he kept the tempo and boosted it yet again, going after her and Sera at a level that would have been very high if they still had Blood with them. The two of them lasted for a while, Sera with her toughness as the hardiest of them, especially considering her skills, and Beth with her sheer grit. It was a not so slow accumulation of damage that took them both out, in the end, as they simply weren't able to withstand Zane's fast and complex assault. The hell of it was, he was still only using his legs and a few random skills to battle the two of them and he had managed to turn the pressure up that much. The whole time, as well, he had a massive, shit-eating grin plastered on his face, finding a visceral joy in beating the hell out of the three of them, the grin only growing with each elimination. Beth tried to add a few tricks at the end, copying him again to fire out a group of blasts all together, but that did little more than drain her mana and cause him to laugh in amusement and surprise.

"Not bad, not bad," he chortled as Beth righted herself, being the last in the ring and thus not needing to try to figure out where she was after being teleported from the ring like the other two.

"I can't really get the knack of it," she said with a frustrated sigh.

"It's a big difference with a Mana Physique," he said, going into what she already thought of as his 'lecture mode.' He leaned forward slightly, hands clasped at the small of his back while he looked at them from under lowered brows.

"Meaning what?" Beth asked, easily playing the ignorant student.

"You have two things here," he said. "Forming a Mana Physique increases your reservoir, that's one. The second is it makes using skills easier, as I'm sure you've noticed. That's further amplified by the fact you've built yourself quite a beauty of a Physique, if I do say so myself. Some people can get the hang of what you're trying before that point, of course, but a lot of people don't have the mana pool or the control over their mana flow to do either long-range casts or multi-casting before getting their Physique."

"So, it's considered a very hard technique?" Blood asked from the side of the stage.

"Eh, yes and no," Zane answered, holding up his right hand and wobbling it before returning it to behind his back. "Some people have a real knack for one or the other, or even both. Other people really struggle with it, and some people basically give up on one or both. Now, the caveat here is that people who are much more purely focused on casting spells have a much easier time, particularly at long-range casts, though they find multi-casting a good bit easier as well."

"Just because of what they do?" Sera asked.

"Yes, yes," Zane said with a nod. "They're casting spells, often even using the full rune-forms to do it, so that both makes them more familiar with the structure of what they're doing, as well as helps them focus on the movement of the mana much more. They also usually have a much higher mana manipulation capability, but that's certainly not a given."

"So, any good advice?" Beth asked.

"Practice," he said with a shrug, which elicited a big sigh from her. "Sorry, kiddo. You might be a decent hand with runes, and only time will tell if you're quite good with them, and you might have good space affinity, but you're no savant with mana control or precision. You're not the worst I've ever seen, that's for damn sure, but you're not setting the world of the Wayfarers on fire with anything you're doing, either."

"Well, thanks for that glowing review," she said with another sigh.

"Well, practice is needed even for those savants I mentioned," he replied with a light chuckle. "Do you need a break, or shall we continue?"

"I'm ready for more," Beth said, getting an approving nod from Sera and something that approximated an agreeable wince from Blood.

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