A note from Comedian0
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Ludger’s eyes moved over him once, not as a person this time, but as a problem worth dissecting.
“Your magic,” he said. “How does it work exactly?”
Hroth blinked. Then one brow rose slightly.
“That’s what you stop me for?”
Ludger ignored the tone.
“It’s different from anything I’ve seen.”
That much was true. Hroth’s magic didn’t move like standard enhancement, nor like ordinary movement skills, nor even like Overdrive in the common sense. It was close enough to certain reinforcement methods to be understood, but strange enough that Ludger had already marked it as something potentially useful the moment the man started bouncing around the battlefield like a cursed projectile.
Hroth studied him for a second.
“You want the details of the technique?”
“No,” Ludger said immediately. “Just the basic principles.”
That left Hroth quiet for a while. He just looked at Ludger, as if weighing whether he should be annoyed, impressed, or mildly alarmed that the boy had just finished hunting a mad pyromancer and was now trying to learn from the aftermath like it was a lesson.
Then, eventually, Hroth shrugged.
“Of course you do,” he muttered.
Hroth let out a slow breath through his nose, then gave Ludger a sidelong look.
“I probably should give you something in exchange,” he said, “considering you let me watch that fight and also removed a whole pack of troublemakers without anyone needing to beg you to do it.”
Ludger said nothing. Hroth took that as permission to continue.
“My magic works in a way somewhat similar to basic runes,” he said. “Not identical, but close enough that the logic overlaps.”
That got Ludger’s full attention. Hroth folded his arms and began explaining in more detail.
“At the simplest level, it applies properties.” He lifted one hand and flexed his fingers slightly as if sorting the ideas in the air. “Weight. force. resistance. direction. pressure. acceleration. not in the pure natural sense, but as magical adjustments imposed onto my body or parts of it.”
Ludger narrowed his eyes slightly. Hroth continued.
“I can make myself heavier for a moment. That helps when I want to hit harder, anchor my footing, resist being thrown, or crash through someone’s guard instead of getting bounced off.” He paused. “Or I can do the opposite and make myself lighter. That reduces the burden of movement, improves my jumps, changes how quickly I can redirect myself, and makes sudden shifts in angle easier.”
He pointed lightly toward the ground with one finger.
“If my legs are lighter at the right moment, I can launch faster. If my upper body becomes heavier just before impact, the strike carries more force. If I reduce part of my weight while increasing forward push, I can glide over the ground for a step instead of sinking into it.”
Ludger listened without speaking. Hroth’s tone grew more practical as he got into the examples.
“I can also alter how force is distributed. For instance, if I reinforce the ‘push’ behind a step, I get far more distance out of the same movement. If I increase resistance in the right place, I can take collisions or deflect impacts better. If I shift directional force through the body correctly, I can turn, rebound, or launch from awkward surfaces far better than I should.”
That matched what Ludger had seen. The violent bouncing. The impossible angles. The sense that Hroth wasn’t merely running fast, but using the world like a series of springboards. Hroth noticed the understanding in his face and nodded once.
“By using combinations, I can bounce around like you saw before.”
He gestured toward the trees and the ruined grove.
“Make myself lighter for the initial movement. Increase forward thrust in the legs. Reduce the burden of impact on landing. Then, at the instant of contact with a wall, floor, pillar, or even an opponent’s body, shift the values again, heavier where I need force, lighter where I need release, more push in the next direction.” His mouth twitched faintly. “That’s how I ricochet.”
He continued in a more detailed rhythm now, clearly speaking to someone who would actually understand the mechanics.
“If I want to cut through a target, I don’t just move fast. I make the step efficient, the body light enough to reach the angle, then increase density or striking force at the moment of impact. If I want to survive a collision, I redistribute force and resistance before contact. If I want to leap off a vertical surface, I alter my relation to weight and push for just long enough that the wall acts more like a launch point than a barrier.”
Ludger’s gaze sharpened further. It really was rune-like. Not because he was drawing symbols in the air, but because the logic was modular. Property-based. Built on applying principles in sequence instead of relying on one blunt effect.
Hroth saw that he was following and shrugged again.
“The hard part is not understanding one property. The hard part is chaining them without tearing your body apart or launching yourself in the wrong direction.” He smirked faintly. “There’s a reason most people don’t do it this way.”
He then added a few more examples, almost casually.
“If I make my body heavier before a grapple, it’s much harder to throw me. If I lighten myself during a fall, I can reduce the force of landing. If I amplify outward force through the shoulders and hips, I can make slashes or claw strikes far nastier. If I combine reduced weight with enhanced directional output, I can reposition faster than most people can track.”
Ludger stayed silent for a moment, fitting the pieces together. Hroth’s magic was not really about speed alone. It was about temporary control over physical conditions. A combat language made of properties. Hroth gave him one last look.
“That’s the basic principle,” he said. “Not the full technique. Not the method. Just the logic.”
Then he smirked, a little more tired now.
“You’re annoying enough that I’m sure you’ll try to steal the idea anyway.”
Ludger looked at Hroth for a moment longer, then said,
“So that’s why our fight a year ago was so annoying.”
Hroth raised a brow. Ludger’s expression stayed flat.
“At the time, I thought it was difficult because you were drunk.” He paused. “I was wrong.”
That drew the faintest twitch at the corner of Hroth’s mouth.
“It was your fighting style.”
Hroth gave a small shrug, as if that explained enough. And honestly, now it did.
Back then, the movement had felt irritating in a way Ludger hadn’t fully understood. Unstable, awkward, slippery, hard to pin down cleanly. He had assumed part of it came from alcohol, from a man moving badly enough to become unpredictable by accident.
Instead, it had been the opposite. The unpredictability had been structured. Built.
Engineered through magic that constantly altered weight, force, and momentum in ways that made every angle feel slightly wrong to an opponent reading the body in normal terms. That explained a lot.
It explained why Hroth had never seemed to move with standard rhythm. Why closing on him had felt off. Why impacts didn’t behave the way they should have. Why even when Ludger had understood the broad intention of a movement, the exact result still came out twisted at the last instant.
It wasn’t drunken sloppiness. It was a fighting style designed to make conventional reading fail. Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly as he continued fitting the concept into place. This type of magic was truly different from anything he had seen until now.
Not stronger in the simple sense. Not louder. Just different. Different enough that it made his mind move in new directions immediately.
If this was the sort of thing that came out of Argarthia, then maybe the people there really did approach magic from an entirely different angle. Less rigid. Less class-bound in appearance. More modular. More willing to twist properties and fundamentals into strange, practical violence.
Maybe they were all like that. The thought lingered longer than it should have.
Not because Ludger was suddenly dreaming about travel, but because a place that produced techniques like Hroth’s was obviously worth seeing with his own eyes. Studying. Picking apart. Stealing from, if necessary. It made him feel, however faintly, that he should go check Argarthia out eventually.
Not now. Definitely not now. He still had too many things to do at home first. Lionsguard. The manuals. The sealed labyrinths. The underworld trail. The noble deaths. His father’s past. The cursed rot buried under all of it.
So Ludger only said, “Interesting.”
Hroth snorted.
“That sounded dangerously close to a compliment.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Good,” Hroth said. “I’d hate for this to become sentimental.”
Ludger ignored that and looked once more toward the distant lights beyond the grove. Argarthia could wait. For now, he had enough problems in his own house to drown a country.
Hroth looked at him for a moment, then sighed the way people did when they realized resistance was pointless.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll explain the basic principle.”
Ludger said nothing, which in this case meant continue .
Hroth crouched and picked up a small stone from the ground, turning it once between his fingers before tossing it lightly and catching it again.
“Most people use mana like fuel,” he began. “Or like pressure. They push it into their body, their weapon, or a spell, and then they expect more output because they put in more power.” He flicked the stone upward again. “That works. It’s also crude.”
Ludger watched in silence.
“What I do starts from a different idea,” Hroth said. “Instead of only pushing more force into something, you use mana to alter the state of how something behaves.” He tossed the stone once more and then held it up. “Heavier. lighter. more resistant. more responsive. easier to move. harder to move. It’s not pure reality manipulation, obviously. You’re not rewriting the world. You’re using mana to impose a temporary magical bias.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly. That wording made sense. Hroth noticed and continued.
“Think of it like this. Your body already knows how to move. Your muscles know how to contract. Your bones know how to bear weight. The ground knows how to push back when you step on it. What my magic does is interfere with the relationship between those things.”
He planted the stone on the back of his hand.
“If I want to jump farther, I can’t just throw mana into my legs and hope it works. That’s wasteful. Instead, I lighten the burden of the movement at the start, then increase the release at the instant of push-off. Less weight to move, more force behind the launch.”
He closed his fist around the stone and straightened.
“If I want a strike to hit harder, I don’t simply reinforce the arm. I can make the arm easier to accelerate during the first half of motion, then increase density or force at the moment of impact. That way the strike travels faster and lands heavier.”
Ludger’s attention sharpened further. Yes. That was the missing bridge between the idea and actual combat use. Hroth went on in a more methodical tone now, seeing that Ludger was following.
“The important part is sequence. The order matters. If you make yourself heavy too early, you slow the movement. If you stay too light at the moment of impact, the attack lacks force. If you reinforce resistance in the wrong place, you kill your own momentum.” He tapped his chest once. “It’s less about raw mana volume and more about timing and distribution.”
He then gave the simplest example he could.
“The easiest application isn’t bouncing off walls or slashing through people,” he said. “It’s a step.”