[Soul, class ended for the day, where are you?]
I used [Clairvoyance] to locate Soul and eventually found the temporary home base set up. It was placed nearby the Temple I would now attend every morning to train with the air element, so it was an easy walk home where I was able to rest soon after. I reviewed my skills on the way home, looking at my inventory, and the new details I learned about the air affinity.
Thanks to spending my mana, it slowly leveled up and it was quite high now.
[Anima - 24]
[Health - 340]
[Mana - 4000]
[Stamina - 550]
[Soul Power - 13]
All of my stats increased, but [Soul Power] has remained fairly constant, only raising three points after so long. I still didn't know what that meant, but the slow rise on it was bothering me.
"Oh, Anima is back. How'd it go?" Ipa said out loud. I left my staff in my inventory and took off my shoes, walking into the house and sighing with my arms crossed.
"It's a cult. I'm in a cult." I told everybody.
"Heh? Cult? Hey, your reputation is shit already, why are you making it worse?!" Ipa yelled at me.
"Calm down! I don't like it any bit, but I've learned some things that are borderline necessary to continue. Like this." I said. I used the [Manip] and [Dispersion] skills to move the air around my hand and create a visible ball for everybody to see.
"It's just a ball. How is that necessary?" Ruby asked me. I smiled, I was glad they weren't completely convinced when I showed them the ball.
Wait, now it's like I'm enticing them to ask more about me by not showing them my full power. Dammit! I'm becoming like the people I hate.
I pulled back on the air ball and launched it at the wall, hitting it and sending wind flowing throughout the house.
The curtains were wildly strewn about and didn't stop moving until about ten seconds after I threw the skill.
"That's amazing! Teach me, teach me!" Ruby shook me until I refused.
"It's harder than that. To even gain the affinity for air you need to eat a rock. Luckily, Shima here consumed it and I didn't have to put that thing in my mouth." I flicked my left arm as I explained and it bounced all around.
"Shima? Who's Shima?" Everybody asked me.
"Oh... right... I never explained. Shima was my slime companion that Joro killed. Our DNA collided when I lost my left arm and now she acts as my left arm for me. Shima was my one true friend until Joro killed her." I said, holding onto my arm.
"That's... so sad..." Ruby was holding back tears. How in the world was she crying after five seconds of explaining that?
"I'm sorry my brother did that to you. We'll get you your payback. So, what can she do?" Ipa asked me.
"A multitude of things. I blocked an attack that would've killed Lum and me with a shield Shima expanded into, I can consume things, and I can restore mana from attacks she disperses. I wonder what else she can do all the time, but those are the things I've experienced with her." I explained it to everybody.
"So, what else can the air thing do?" Ruby asked with curiosity. She sat down on the couch nearby.
"I've been wondering that myself," I said to everybody.
Now that I think about it, it was interesting that I could launch air like that. I wanted to turn it into a reusable skill that I could use without having to initiate [Dispersion] first.
The way I think about it, if air and water are so similar, maybe I should look at them the same way. Water is air, it's just denser. Even Zeus himself said that [Manip] and [Dispersion] can be used with water. I can safely draw the conclusion that they are fundamentally the same.
"I want to get a skill for my combo here. Can you combine any skills?" I turned to Soul, wondering how I could improve.
"You can, but the mana usage increases by twofold and you can't use the skills separately. Would you need them separately for anything?" She asked me. I shook my head and Soul told me to pull out some more magic parchment. I didn't have any, but Ipa luckily did on his way into town. He handed me some of the magic parchment and Soul gave me her pen.
"So, if you want to combine the two skills, write it like this." Soul demonstrated how it would work. Basically, I draw the two skills and their details separately, then I combine them into one by adding everything to each other and renaming the skill. The new skill was called [Dismanip], which sounded better, at least in my opinion.
Using the skill combined with the others, I could summon a small spike of air that I could launch at the wall. When used quick enough, that spike of air could collide with other spikes as well, which bounced them off of each other and covered more ground. I wonder if I learned how to mobilize the skill if I could bounce one spike of air off of other random locations thanks to the skill.
It was so much to think about. Not to mention, I thought about it in a complicated way. I just wanted to freely control the spike of air however I wanted to. That was the end of it.
I wonder what else I could learn from Zeus. I felt bad erasing his hard work by combining the two skills, but I also couldn't idolize him for his genius considering he was running a cult. I needed to learn more about this cult as well... after class tomorrow.