Seeing the results of the collision, Arianna had the urge to laugh out loud, she remembered how her idol, the strongest woman in battle terms of the whole White Fang galaxy, suddenly appeared in front of her a week ago.
And after making her show the results of some kind of training which her muscle head of a father taught her, Aura nodded in recognition before saying.
“Are you willing to become my second and last disciple?”.
Even before her voice could come out, Arianna immediately bowed three times as she accepted Aura as her master, her idol wanted her to be her disciple it was like a dream come true.
Then Aura gave her a gift for becoming her disciple, a spell with an effect she has never heard off, it consisted in two parts, first, by using small quantities of electricity to stimulate the muscles, they will break and then reform, which unlike the battle aura of a knight it affected not only the external layer of the body but even reached the most hidden muscle fibers.
Of course, this was all a theory which Aura compilated throughout some years, she even developed the process to follow in case someone wanted to train on it, and she was about 90% sure that it would work.
But she was still honest with Arianna, mana circuits exist within the muscles, bones, skin, organs etc. So, any boosting and reinforcing is normally done using those mana circuits as conducts.
The downside is that mana circuits don’t cover the whole part so their effect is limited, the solution Aura thought is simple, don’t use a spell which uses mana circuits, but an external mean that affects the muscles as a whole.
And that’s how she modified the shackles of despair to not only increase the weight of the one using them, but also release currents of electricity of a certain voltage during a determined period of time, then with practice the effect could be reproduced with electricity produced by mana.
The hard part which conformed that 10% of uncertainty Aura had, started, if the recovery and regeneration of the muscle fibers couldn’t keep up with the pace of the training, then there was a risk of damaging the body and even the mana circuits as the electricity will fry the muscles, nerve endings and everything in its way.
That’s why Aura only selected Arianna from all the candidates she had, and even then, she was told that it was only a trial week, if by the end of the next week’s same day where she learned it, there were to be any damage to her body, then the spell will be banned, if not she will be taught the second part of the spell.
Today when they returned to the academy, Aura quickly visited Arianna and after inspecting her, she knew the werewolf girl has perfectly followed her instructions, the muscle fibers in her arms and legs had gone through a fundamental change.
Normally about thirty percent of what composes the body of a human woman is muscle tissue, werewolves are not adept to the knight’s path just because of anything, their muscle tissue reaches about fifty percent at most.
And something Daimon noticed is that in a lot of beast races there is at least branch in which women have bigger constitution than men, in the Revy clan for example, the tallest of them all women and men included is Erin who reaches about two meters, her tail is also the biggest… and the fluffiest in Daimon’s opinion.
Liz and Elaine are also taller than the peers of their same generations also according to Erin, Aura doesn’t lose with her physically, and while in the werewolf race men are taller, in terms of muscle tissue percentage women actually surpass them by a small five percent.
Leaving that aside, men can use at most about a third of those muscles actively, women on the other hand only use about one quarter of theirs, of course there are exceptions, but that is the most common case.
But now thanks to Aura’s instructions, after years of training without knowing Arianna was able to use about half of her muscle tissue, and then with the stimulation of electricity she activated ten percent more.
Of course, that by itself wasn’t enough to make up for the difference in strength of a knight using battle aura, as she hasn’t actively trained those muscles for more thana a mere week since Aura took her as her disciple and gave her those modified shackles of despair.
That’s why Arianna dodged Cayden’s attack; how did she manage to overwhelm him in the previous confrontation then you may ask.
The answer is simple, how can a bullet with the size of a finger destroy things many times bigger than it, “acceleration”, Arianna used lightning to create momentum and then clashed against Cayden, all that accumulation was liberated at the contact and that’s why the point of contact in this case their weapons exploded due to the impact.
Now you might imagine the scene of a bullet colliding against a wall, normally the bullet would shatter due to the impact, but then what happens when the bullet is designed to pierce through, like an antimaterial one, the bullet will destroy whatever is its path and continue advancing until it loses its momentum.
The training didn’t increase Arianna’s strength yet, but it increased the density of her muscles without affecting their size, her element was lightning which was the best possible source of acceleration, which combined created an explosive liberation of energy upon contact, just like being hit by the bullet of a cannon.
Then after the impact, her body which was reinforced inwardly instead of externally dissipated the drawback, resulting in the current situation in which Arianna was perfectly fine, while Cayden was bleeding from his nose and mouth.
His reinforced body was enough to not explode due to the impact, but his organs were still shaken causing him internal bleed.
“Huff~huff~huff”, Cayden was gasping for air, he looked downwards and saw small holes on the chest plate, which made him take a breath of cold air, while metal and probably wind were the known elements with the sharpest properties, lightning had the highest penetrative force.
Normally that small amount of elemental damage would not be too much of a problem, but due to the impact his chest was hurting like hell, and that was without a proper attack spell.
“If that bitch were to be using an offensive type of booster, due to my own carelessness she could have ripped a hole in my chest!”, concluded Cayden, after that thought flashed through his mind, his eyes became bloodshot, he a member of the obsidian armored branch of the werebear race, was defeated in an upfront confrontation, it was an utter humiliation.
“Haaa!!!”, Cayden shouted, with him as the center, the ground started trembling, then the hairs of his arms hardened, this was the characteristic of the Cayden’s family branch, just like how the horn of a rhinoceros is formed of hardened keratin, the protein that forms hair of animals and nails, the hair in Cayden’s arms is works the same way, as long as battle aura is injected on it, it becomes a weapon.
And that is not all, the platform below his feet cracked due to the sudden increase on his weight, then his battle aura exploded around him, since Arianna is a lightning user, he knew there was no point in chasing after her, so instead of that he increased his defense while he charged a wide area martial art he learned to deal with fast enemies.
The sight of dark brown battle aura radiating from his body was quite impactful, but Arianna’s situation didn’t lose at all, currents of electricity covered both her arms and legs.
Half of the platform was trembling and the other half was covered in electricity which crackled as it impacted on the ground, after five seconds both of them had their respective attacks ready.
“Obsidian Devastation!”.
“Charge”.
Two different voices could be heard, one angry and loud, the other one calm and soft, Arianna disappeared from where she was standing, which made Cayden thunderously laugh.
“You fell for it, go die!”, unlike what others might expect, Cayden’s attack didn’t only consist in a mass of battle aura being throwed at the enemy as everyone thought, battle aura is heavy so it would be hard to caught a lightning mage off guard with it, so what was used for the attack were those black needle-like hairs of his arms.
All of them were shot from his arms forming a black net which covered everything in his field of vision, some of them hit the ground breaking large pieces of it, others impacted the walls at the other sides of the arena making the spectators worry for their lives, until they saw the defensive magic formation activating protecting them from missed attacks.
The natural reaction of a mage would have been to dodge the attacks unless one wanted to become a sieve, but Arianna not only didn’t stop, she even accelerated one more time.
As if they could already see the tragic scene of Arianna’s body being stabbed by the countless number of black needles, a lot of the students sighed.
“What a shame, such a pretty girl will be disfigured”, and other similar things could be heard coming from the stands, even the referees decided to interfere as they couldn’t imagine a way to get out of the that situation without jumping from the platform, unless she could fly which was impossible for those below the Arch ranks.
But as they were about to protect Arianna from the attack Aura send them a sound transmission saying.
“Don’t interfere, I will take responsibility in case anything happens”.
The referees doubted but since Arianna is part of the Argent family, then Aura as the matriarch of the family could represent her, so while thinking that maybe Aura had a grudge against her, they simply shrugged and stayed still.
But then the situation changed again, most of the spectator were low ranked mages and couldn’t see it, but Arch ranks, half emperors, a certain black-haired youth and his mother did notice…. the slight smirk that formed in the corner of Arianna’s mouth.
The space between every needle was about forty centimeters and behind of it the wave of battle aura followed, the needles had the job of restraining the moves of the enemy and the wave of battle aura will impact it making it fall and then being hit by the rest of the needles.
Daimon also noticed Aura was smiling and then when he focused on Arianna’s body, his pupils widened a bit, she… was perfectly dodging all the needles while parrying the impact of Cayden’s battle aura.
If others had Daimon’s infinity eyes, they could have seen in slow motion how Arianna “danced” though the rain of needles, dodging them by a few millimeters as she advanced towards a still smiling Cayden as his eyes couldn’t follow her movements.
“Now that is something even I didn’t expect”, thought Daimon.