A week into group training with Shiori and Inari taught Jun one thing in particular, and that was that her mother's lessons over the past few months had been just the basics. The first day had left her body and mana channels aching from overuse and the training only grew harder as the two women pushed their daughters and their friends to their limits and beyond.

While the silent masked warriors Inari summoned to fight the students pressed them on physical fighting skills, even the mages and healers, Shiori and Inari took a more personal touch in magical combat. Under their watchful eyes, Jun and the others dueled with magic as Shiori beat the essence of magical combat into the aspiring adventurers. With Jun and the other magic-focused students, Shiori drilled them on speed and flexibility, pushing them to use their spells in more creative ways.

Jun thought her mother might teach them new spells, remembering the strange transfers of knowledge that gave her her first spells, but Shiori never raised the topic. Instead, she somehow was able to mimic all of their spells and use them against them, demonstrating through action the ways magic could be used.

Jun sent a swarm of miniscule barriers out in a spray, forming a small cloud of weak obstacles as a line of fireballs rocketed towards her. Her spells were pathetically weak, only the size of a bee and with just enough mana to stay stable. They wouldn't have stood up to a determined fly, let alone an attacker, but stopping someone wasn't the point.

A curious aspect of many attack spells were that once they hit a target, their magical structure would usually destabilize unless specifically designed to keep going, a so called "piercing" type spell according to Shiori. Piercing spells were usually designed to deal with hardened defenses and rarely effective against a group even slightly spread out. Instead, "impact" type spells that had an area of effect, such as the ever popular fireball, were popular because they consumed all of the remaining mana invested in them on impact, destroying the spell's structure as they unleashed an effect far more powerful than the amount of mana would normally allow for. Impact spells were popular to use against both groups and individuals because even if blocked, they often consumed far more mana than the attacker spent on the spell, and perfect accuracy wasn't necessary. Close definitely counted with fireballs.

But the strength of an impact type spell was also a weakness. Dozens of small explosions filled the air, sounding like a fireworks show as each spell met a tiny barrier and erupted in a ball of flame, destroying more of the small barriers as they went off. Even though each attack engulfed and destroyed multiple barriers with every blast, Jun barely noticed the backlash from such small spells being destroyed.

As the stream of attacks petered out, Jun sent her cloud of tiny barriers a new command, feeding them a fresh wave of mana as they swarmed after her attacker. Swarming like angry bees, the tiny barriers repeatedly slammed into her attacker hard enough that they would have broken bones on Earth. But against the iron ranked stats and body of her opponent they were little more than a distraction that left painful stinging welts behind.

"Damnit Jun that stings!" Aya yelped, jumping back and propelling herself into the air with a blast of flame to escape the stinging swarm.

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Ignoring Aya's curses, Jun kept up the pressure, directing her swarm to chase after her friend in a display of aggressive defense. In straight up contest of attacks, Jun knew she couldn't match her friend in power, but Aya's power was expensive in mana. Even as Aya darted back and forth in the air on her newly developed flying technique and let out great gouts of flame to burn through her swarm, Jun knew she was rapidly burning through her pool of mana.

When her swarm measured less than half their original number Jun a large amount of mana into her spell, replenishing and strengthening her swarm. Where Aya was powerful but inefficient, Jun excelled in contests of stamina with her efficient spells and high regeneration. Yet, she had another weakness. Managing her spells took an extreme amount of focus.

Splitting her focus away from the swarm to take the next step in her strategy, Jun felt a growing pain in her head as Aya's flame blasts reaped a brutal toll on her spells. Where she had been able to direct her barriers to avoid the worst of the blasts before, her reactions slowed.

Aya let out a victory cry as she decimated Jun's swarm, the backlash from the destruction of so many spells in such a short period of time bursting a vein in Jun's nose. Swooping around, the battlemage burst through the center of Jun's much reduced swarm!

…Right into her trap. Willing her spell to coalesce, a dozen tendrils erupted out from the remainder of the swarm, weaving a net of snares that quickly constricted around Aya. Shouting in surprise, the battlemage sent a last ditch burst of flame at Jun, the spell sneaking through the gaps in her defenses to sear through her left bicep and explode in the sand behind her. Dark memories resurfaced as the fiery pain threatened to overwhelm her senses but with a herculean effort Jun kept her focus, tightening her grip on Aya.

She didn't notice the hidden threat creeping up on her, but something did. Jun nearly dropped her spells in surprise as most of her mana was suddenly sucked out of her core and the ghostly tail she'd thought tamed reappeared, wildly lashing out at something behind her. It wasn't until she felt a staggering wave of mana flood back into her, again nearly stealing her focus, that she looked behind her to see the glowing white spell wrapped around one of Inari's masked warriors, his hands tightly gripping one of the katana-like swords they preferred.

A faint grunt and the sound of bones creaking was the only clue she had that her unique spell was trying its best to kill the man, but from the strength of his mana flooding into her without stop she knew he was far beyond her if he actually tried.

An oppressive presence filled the room for just a moment, stilling everyone. In the ensuing silence, Shiori's voice rang out, loud and clear. "Enough. Jun, release Aya and Inari's servant." Warm healing magic filled the void left by her mother's command as she felt the burns and injuries from her spar rapidly heal until the pain and injuries were but a distant memory.

Listening to her mother, Jun gently set Aya down, but the ghostly tail seemed to ignore her for a few seconds as it continued to ineffectually try to squeeze the life out of the masked warrior. Turning to look behind her, Jun shaped her will into a spear and sent sharp command backed by a hefty dose of mana to release the warrior. As soon as her mana-backed intent stabbed into the spell's nexus it finally obeyed her and stopped squeezing the masked man, reluctantly setting the warrior down as it sent an impression of a sulking puppy.

Banishing the spell with a mind of it's own back to wherever it normally went, Jun turned back around with a sigh, only to freeze as several sets of eyes looked at her oddly. Shiori and Inari exchanged a look before her mother raised an eyebrow at her. Jun thought she wanted to say something to her, but she was surprised when Shiori and Inari dissected her and Aya's fight for the assembled students, discussing where each of the mages succeeded or misstepped.

Jun tried to follow along with the discussion, but her thoughts were preoccupied with the tail's actions. What was going on with it?

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