New Eden: Live to Play, Play to Live

Chapter 960: Different Tests For Different People



"Be our gun barrel. Hold the water globes from extending past a certain point, which Winston will help with, and spin them like they are bullets travelling through a gun barrel."

Aapo's eyes were fixated on him, his heart pounding in his chest. The task, seemingly

straightforward, loomed over Aapo like an insurmountable mountain, threatening to swallow him whole.

"Sir... I can barely feel them or hold them. You are asking me to move them... Isn't this a bit too much?"

Alex shook his head in response.

"You don't have to worry about holding them together. That is Violette's job. And holding them in place is Winston's. Your job is to move them on a rotary trajectory. You can do it. Learning this will help you as well."

The Finn was still unconvinced he could achieve this, and his incertitude reflected on his face. But there was no time to play around.

"Begin now. If you can spin these until we touch the ground, I will teach each of you something that will help with getting stronger."

Immediately, Violette started cycling the temperature in the orb. It wasn't too complicated at first until she realized that going from one extreme to another was tougher than she expected. If she had four water balls, cycling them from hot to tepid, to cold and back wouldn't have been too hard. But with three, it meant that flash boil them after the freezing part.

She was almost sure Alex had given her that order because he knew that freezing the water was easier for her than boiling it. But she was managing.

That was until Aapo started spinning them.

At first, the rotation was slow, practically imperceptible. But it quickly took speed, reaching a rotation of one cycle every three seconds.

Given the width of the circle they were kept in, that was already pretty quick, making Violette's focus on her task a little complicated.

Alex grinned as he noticed Aapo's distraught expression finally calm down.

'He just found his way.'

In Aapo's mind, all this time, he had been looking at the balls like three objects he needed to spin individually, and with his pitiful mana control abilities, it was an arduous task.

But as he spun them around, he recalled what Alex had told him.

'Be the gun barrel... How could I be a gun barrel to three spinning projectiles...'

But as he spun them faster, his eyes started losing their focus on each individual orb. Quickly enough, he was looking at it as a whole.

That's when his mind clicked into place.

He started imagining the trajectory as the inside of a barrel, and the three orbs as a single, large bullet. His mind honed in on this thought, as he thought of spinning his imaginary bullet faster, to achieve greater accuracy.

He knew the speed bullets spun was dependent on rifling in a barrel, and that each of them varied from one gun to another. But his mind started thinking off the beaten path.

'What if I can force it to achieve a higher speed? Could mana control do this?' he thought.

His focus honed in on his imaginary bullet, and he started thinking of ways to accelerate the rotation. And the results were immediate.

As he controlled what little mana he could, to form a vortex, the balls started spinning increasingly fast, until they became almost a blur to the naked eye.

Already, Violette had stopped relying on her eyes to track them, closing them and using her mana senses alone to keep track of the three orbs. Splitting her mind on all three of them, as they spun at this speed, cycling the temperature, had become more than just challenging.

She could tell this was what Alex had meant when he said her task would become harder, but she hadn't imagined it would be this hard.

Simply keeping track of them was already a herculean task. Controlling their temperature at the same time was taking a toll on her focus.

The seconds felt like minutes, as Kary looked at this in silence, a smile on her lips.

'He may be a terrible strategist, but he has a knack for thinking outside the box. Each of them is using a type of control that will be useful for their strengthening.'

Winston had already changed the shape of his hardened mana to accommodate the quick spin of the water orbs, and had to harden it constantly, as the centrifugal force threatened to shatter his mana.

He had already changed it from a simple, plate-like shape to a donut-like case, in which the orbs were spinning at a break-neck pace. And with all his focus, he hardened it, thickening and compressing the mana manifold, so it withheld the pressure.

Violette was being forced to split her attention on many factors at the same time, practicing her split focus to the extreme. If she managed to hold this on the battlefield, she would be able to change her spells on the fly and adapt in a split second to changing circumstances.

As for Aapo, his learning moment was when he finally stopped relying on what humanity considered standard logic. When he finally freed his mind from those pre-established conventions, the speed at which his mind adapted was incredible.

The spin on the orbs was far faster than anything she had ever seen. There was a visible funnel forming under the orbs' path, caused by the intense rotation and the cycling temperatures.

She could tell Alex was already controlling the effect the test was having on their surroundings, as she felt his mana move all around them.

She became curious about Jonathan's task, and extended her senses outside, encompassing a large area around the plane.

And what she felt amazed her.

Jonathan, in an impressive feat of wind control, was practically rewriting the laws of nature.

Expanding her mana senses further, to fully see his prowess, Kary almost gasped in awe.

'This is beyond simply controlling his mana... It's like the wind is reacting to his thoughts and adapting to his will...'