Chapter 265 – Small Steps

“The first you need to learn is how to use your dragon form,” Sophie said, sitting cross legged in front of Yuki. 

“What do you mean? Fighting as a dragon?” Yuki asked.

“No. Transforming parts of yourself into their dragon variants to use them for combat,” Sophie explained. “Your mana comes with you, but your physique doesn’t. We’re going to mitigate that as much as possible.”

“Is this something all dragons do when fighting?” 

“To a certain degree,” Sophie nodded. “It is a fighting style. Like all fighting styles, it has different levels. Most get the first parts. Bring out claws. Hardening your skin until they’re scale-like. Changing out eyes. I’ll be trying to teach you that. Then we’ll escalate from there little by little.”

Yuki nodded. It all sounded good to her. Though, there was something that struck her as odd.

“Wouldn’t changing our fingers into claws summon our real sized claws?” she asked. “They’re quite big.”

“That’s part of the technique,” Sophie replied. “Being able to manipulate the shape of it. Fighting with giant claws isn’t practical. Same if we try to transform our arms. It would just weigh us down. So we learn to alter the size.”

“Oh, I see. That’s good.”

“Let me show you what I’m talking about,” Sophie said, rising to her feet. “I’ll do something a bit advanced. Watch.”

She rolled the long sleeve of her blouse up and displayed her arm, putting it right in front of her chest. As Yuki watched it, the skin on Sophie’s arm hardened and soft brown scales sprouted out until they covered the entirety of her arm in a brown armor. 

“Takes only a second,” Sophie smiled. “It’s just as tough as our real scales.”

She put her other hand out and summoned a knife before she stabbed down at her scale covered arm. The knife skidded right off of the plating.

“See? It’ll absorb a lot of physical attacks and some magical. It’s almost like an really upgraded chainmail,” she said. 

“That seems really useful,” Yuki said.

“It is. But.” Sophie raised a finger. “But. How close these scales are to your actual scales depends on you. How well you’re acquainted with your dragon-self and how good your control is. Remember how I said that the things like hardening your skin is basically level one? That’s because that only focuses on one property and so is easier for fledglings to learn.”

“The scale thing is just an upgraded form of that?”

“Yes. Instead of just making your skin tougher, your summoning your scales and shrinking and molding them to fit your elf body,” Sophie said. “It’s considerably more difficult. There’s also the fact that you have to maintain it, otherwise it’ll disappear.”

“It takes mana to maintain, right?” Yuki asked.

“Of course. The amount of mana depends on how much you alter the part and whether or not you maximize your mana usage.”

“I see.”

“Well. Let’s give this a try then,” Sophie smiled. “Up now.”

Yuki went to her feet and cracked her back. 

“Where do I start?” she asked, stretching now.

“Well, we’ll try with hardening,” Sophie said. “It’s simple to explain, but doing it is a completely different beast.”

“Perfect. Just what I wanted.”

“You have time. Don’t worry,” she laughed. “Here’s what you need to do. You need to recall what your scales felt like. Their properties. Then focus on the strength. The toughness. And try to bring that to real life.”

“Sophie. I literally just discovered I was a dragon about an hour or two ago,” Yuki said. 

“That’s why this will be harder for you than most,” she smiled. “Now, chop chop. Time may be slower here, but you still need to eat outside.”

Yuki sighed, but closed her eyes to at least give the technique a try. She touched her mana and settled her mind. This may take a while.

‘I’ve turned into a dragon once, and now I have to remember every part of myself,’ she thought. ‘Wonderful.’

But it could only help her if she mastered it. It would give her abilities and tools to defeat foes. She had to try.

‘Though. It’s probably going to take a long time. A long. Time.’

Two days. Forty eight hours within her mana dimension and Yuki finally managed to obtain progress. It took probably hundreds of tries with constant shifting back and forth between her forms in order to remember how her scales felt. 

All that, just to harden her skin. 

“It’s progress,” Sophie had encouraged. “No one just starts being able to ride a bike without learning how to balance.”

“Sophie. This is like trying to balance when you don’t even know how to stand,” Yuki replied.

“Well, at least you have legs, now can’t you,” Sophie smiled. “That means you can stand. And that means you can balance.”

In between these sessions, Yuki ate her meals and watched battles in the arena. She had a two day break from her last fight before she would be brought out again to battle. She made sure to record notes on every winner and any losers that caught her attention. 

Every now and then, she would find Jesse and her friends and they would talk about life. They helped her get acclimated to the social life of the Coliseum. Or rather, the lack of social life. Almost no one spoke with each other. Jesse and her group seemed like outliers from what Yuki observed. 

She understood why the others wouldn’t want to associate with others. That other person might be your opponent one day. They will be battling to defeat you at best, or kill you at worst. Or that other person might one day lose against someone too strong and they will be the one to die, leaving you alone.

For that reason, Yuki tried to keep all interactions between her and Jesse’s group as objective orientated as possible. 

She tried.

On the eve of her next fight, she was within her mana dimension, struggling again. Sophie was with her, watching silently and offering words of encouragement every now and then.

Yuki was glad that Sophie was there, though her words grated on Yuki’s nerves at times when she was especially frustrated with her progress. There was someone to talk to, someone to just have a conversation with within her isolated room. 

She was also glad that her mana dimension existed. It was removed from the outside world, going two times faster. Her forty eight hours within it amounted to only a day outside. If she didn’t have the luxury of having so much time, she wouldn’t have been able to even get any progress done before her next battle.

‘It still doesn’t stop the fact that this is so slow going, though,’ she thought. 

Now that she managed to do what Sophie described as a beginner technique, she wanted to push it to see how far she could do. She had a general idea as to how to do it. It was just a matter of whether or not she could perform.

‘Alright. Let’s try this. Here we go.’

She pictured a scale in her mind, her scale. It’s shining silver hue with its smooth texture that had just the smallest bumps and ridges here and there. She saw everything down to its thickness and edges. She knew the strength of this scale, having tested it so many times in the last two days, stabbing at her legs in dragon form and throwing herself at objects to feel the impact. She could see it so vividly in her mind.

With a deep breath, she moved that image of that silver scale over the back of her right hand, imagining the scale embedding itself with her skin. The next part always proved to be the trickiest for Yuki. Maintaining that image in her mind, she reached towards her mana and let a trickle come out. She nudged it towards the hand in her mind while trying to keep the scene in her head as clear as possible. 

Her jaw clenched and her lips pressed together as she focused. Her hand began to itch. She resisted the urge to scratch it. Sudden movements would throw her off. 

When she felt that she had given enough mana, she opened her eyes. Then she breathed out a sigh of relief.

On the back of her right hand, a small silver scale, the size of a dime, gleamed in the light. She dripped mana into it, making sure that it did go away, and examined her hand with a small smile across her face.

‘I did it,’ she thought. ‘I did it.’

“Well done,” Sophie said. “You seem to be getting the concept down.”

“I think so,” Yuki nodded. “I’m still far away from being a master though.”

“Of course. But you’ve taken the first few steps. There is still a lot more ahead of you. Transforming like this is only a small part of the journey.”

“The journey?” Yuki asked. “The journey to mastering this?”

“No. The journey of escaping this place. You need to learn a lot more than just this. But,” Sophie said, her voice growing softer, “this shows me that you can do it. And I hope it showed you that too. It’ll be hard, but if you keep going at it, you’ll break through.”

Yuki knew Sophie was right. Just this one scale was the work of two days. But she did it. 

“You really must have been a teacher back then,” Yuki said. “Saying things like that.”

“Encouraging students was half my job,” she smiled. “Now it’s the time for me to do the second half.”