Alex finished the thought out loud before it could slip away into the background noise of Adaptation still sorting data.
"Zara, I did not feel you use any mana when you did that,"
"The bond was wide open the entire time,"
"I would have felt the draw if there had been one,"
"Only the Shadow Element and the strength it gave your attributes came through,"
"Zara, was that deliberate?"
Zara walked away from the fresh crater without looking at the damage she had left in the forest floor.
She crossed the short stretch of disturbed earth, torn roots, and radiating cracks and stopped beside him, close enough that the residual cold of the still-active mantle brushed the edge of the bond like a second, quieter temperature.
A small smirk sat at the corner of her mouth when she finally turned her head toward him.
’Argh! There she goes being smug again!’
"Yes," she said.
"I did not use mana to empower that stomp,"
"Not a single drop left my system for it,"
"What you felt was the Shadow Element itself and the natural attributes it was boosting while the mantle stayed active,"
"Nothing else was feeding the strike,"
"No mana circulation or a different skill trigger, it was just the element and the body it was already enhancing."
She let the statement hang for a moment, clearly enjoying the way he was still turning the implication over in real time.
The bond carried a quiet thread of amusement under the practical tone, the same mild satisfaction she had shown when her shadow made the V-sign earlier.
"That display was not meant to show you the maximum power I can produce when I use everything available to me," she continued.
"If I had added full mana circulation, formal skills, and real combat intent on top of the mantle, the result would have been significantly larger and significantly louder,"
"Then the crater wouldn’t have been your main problem, and you would have needed more than one arm to keep the debris out of your face, that is to say, if you had remained on the ground at all,"
"I kept the demonstration limited on purpose so you could isolate the variable and feel what the element does when it is the only thing working."
’Hmm...is she trying to crush me ego?’
’...because it is working quite well...’
Alex stayed quiet and let her finish.
Adaptation was still sorting the sensory data from the stomp, and the complete absence of mana expenditure kept rising to the top of the list as the most important anomaly he had recorded all morning.
The efficiency difference between her casual strike and his own struggling dark-vision cycles was almost offensive.
"The reason I showed you that stomp was so you could feel the pure effect of the Shadow Element," Zara said.
Her voice stayed even and instructional, the same register she used when she decided a lesson needed to be understood rather than merely watched.
"It had nothing else mixed in, no mana feeding the impact, no secondary skills layered on top of the physical motion, it was just the shadow, applied correctly by someone who has trained with it for years,"
"That alone is strong enough to matter in a real fight if the user knows what they are doing and has put in the necessary work,"
"Someone who trains properly can do genuine wonders with nothing but this element,"
"The ceiling is higher than most people assume when they only ever see the common affinities and decide those are the only ones worth studying."
She glanced at the crater one more time, then back at him.
The small smirk had faded into something more serious, though the confidence underneath it had not moved at all.
"Shadow is not like the others you have heard about since you started studying the continent’s basics," she said.
"Fire, water, air, earth, the standard set that shows up in every primer and every low-level instructor’s lecture,"
"Those are widespread,"
"You can find competent users of them in almost any city of reasonable size, and the techniques for them are well documented,"
"Shadow is rare here, extremely rare,"
"Most people on this continent will go their entire lives without meeting a true shadow user, and the ones who do usually only encounter incomplete or heavily diluted versions that never reach real combat application,"
"They see a trick or a minor utility and assume that is the limit."
Alex felt the weight of that statement settle alongside the memory of the half-meter crater and the complete lack of mana draw.
’Well, mom did mention that shadow users were rare in the continent, I guess only our house and few rare other cases occur in our kingdom with this shadow element related class.’
Rare and versatile was a dangerous combination in any system he had ever studied, in either life.
"So it is rare, and from what you just did it can be used for utility as well as self-enhancement," he said, following the chain of logic out loud so she could correct him if he drifted.
"Aggressive offense and defense as well? The stomp already proved the offense side."
"Alex, There is no hard limit on how the Shadow Element can be applied once the user understands its nature," Zara answered.
The bond carried a deeper note of conviction now, the kind that came from personal experience and long observation rather than textbook theory.
"Utility, self-enhancement, direct offense, defense, misdirection, mobility, concealment, binding, bla-bla-bla..."
"I can keep going about it,"
"Because the only real limit is the user and the quality of their imagination,"
"A rigid mind will only ever produce rigid results, no matter how strong the affinity is or how many skill points they pour into formal techniques,"
"Someone willing to test the edges of what the element will accept, and willing to fail repeatedly while testing those edges, can keep finding new applications for decades,"
"That is why raw control matters more than raw quantity of power."
She paused.
The residual cold of the mantle still moved through the bond in a slow, steady cycle, a living reminder that the demonstration had not yet been fully released and that the power she was describing was still active in her body while she explained it.
"There is a reason your mother is one of the most influential figures in this kingdom and across large parts of the continent," Zara said.
Her voice had dropped slightly, not in volume but in register, the way it did when she spoke about the woman who had trained her and set the standard she still measured herself against.
"It is not simply because she was born with an absurdly high affinity to the Shadow Element,"
"Plenty of people are born with rare affinities and still die as footnotes in someone else’s report,"
"It is because of the degree of control she has achieved over shadow itself,"
"I do not believe anyone currently active on this continent can match her,"
"Not even those so called—"
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End of Chapter 117: No Mana
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