Christopher POV:
It had been a blur since yesterday's revelation. Christopher, still reeling from the shock of Akira's Astra status and the terrifying truth of Astral Society, found himself stepping into a new, dangerous reality.
After school, he and Akira headed to what his friend vaguely termed his "secret base of operations."
Located on the outskirts, near the edge of the city peaking into the slums, nestled between the buzzing high tech city and the dark blue sea which spread across the east. At an abandoned shipping dock facility, apparently one of the first places to utilize "hydroatomenuclear" energy, the so called clean energy the world runs on now.
This was where they would establish their base. This was where they would establish as their base.
Akira, he learned, funded his vigilante work by discreetly helping those who couldn't turn to the corrupt authorities – a clandestine economy that paid well enough for him to renovate this place.
It wasn't the sprawling luxury of the Saphelle manor, but it was functional: a surprisingly robust setup of computers, monitors, and communication equipment, all powered up and ready.
Christopher, ever the pragmatist, saw the utility. This was his access point. His research into his parents' death and the vanished mana research had always hit dead ends, the official channels guarded by impenetrable silence. But Akira, a living, breathing product of the system's lies, was a direct link.
And Christopher, in turn, could offer something invaluable.
Before fully committing, Christopher had returned to his manor, but not just to sleep. Guided by his unparalleled intellect and years of clandestine study, he navigated the secure, forgotten wings of his parents' vast company archives.
He didn't just take "equipment"; he meticulously selected proprietary mana-tech prototypes that had remained undocumented after the incident eight years ago.
These weren't standard computers; they were advanced diagnostic tools, encrypted communication arrays, and rudimentary mana-readers—devices designed to interact with the very energy that now flowed through Astras.
He loaded them, along with some of his personal, cutting-edge analytical software, into a discreet vehicle, his heart thrumming with a grim satisfaction. This was how he would contribute.
For the next week, while Akira was out on his initial vigilante missions—stopping burglars and petty thieves to build his fighting experience, as he wasn't yet allowed into the more dangerous dungeons—Christopher was tethered to the monitors. From the shadows of their nascent command center, he watched.
He processed data feeds, tracked patrol routes, analyzed escape routes, shortcuts and geographical vantage points, providing real-time tactical support. He was the invisible eye, the strategic mind, a silent guardian no one could see.
He observed Akira in action. The way he maneuvered around the city on a near daily basis helping civilians. He was amazing; the raw power of his flames, the instinctive agility, the effortless way he moved.
A familiar ache of inadequacy, born of his own physical limitations, settled deep in Christopher's gut, even as he admired Akira's raw talent.
After he had grown accustomed to this remote support, Akira decided that for Christopher's safety, and for the inevitable missions where he'd have to accompany him, Christopher would need personal combat training.
And so, the following week, the grueling regimen began.
The idea of physical training had always been anathema to Christopher. His world was one of theorems, algorithms, and data analysis, not sweat and strained muscles.
However the motivation was clear: if Akira got caught, the authorities would eventually track Christopher down.
And more importantly, this was his only tangible path to answers about his parents.
Every morning, the alarm blared at five a.m., a jarring assault on his well-ordered sleep schedule. He would drag his body out of bed, each limb protesting, and begin: thirty push-ups, thirty squats, thirty pull-ups, thirty crunches, and a three-kilometer run.
For his previously unathletic frame, each rep was a battle, each breath a gasp. His muscles burned, a constant, unfamiliar ache that replaced his usual intellectual hum.
His lungs screamed for air, his limbs trembled, and sweat poured down his face, blurring his vision.
At school, he found himself struggling to focus, nodding off in classes, his mind dulled by physical exhaustion.
He felt clumsy, inefficient, like a machine suddenly forced to run on grit instead of logic.
Akira, with an almost infuriating ease, would demonstrate techniques, his movements fluid and natural.
Christopher, trying to mimic, felt like a puppet whose strings were constantly tangled.
He'd watch Akira leap, duck, and strike, and then he'd try, stumbling, misjudging distances, his body refusing to obey his mind.
The contrast was stark, and Christopher, for the first time in his life, knew true physical inadequacy. He was an intellectual but he felt physically subpar.
….
The weeks crawled by, a relentless cycle of physical exertion and strategic analysis, all which maintaining the guise of being a less than diligent student.
It was the last week of Spring, with summer break approaching.
School life remained uneventful, but his personal hell had become a daily constant. His body, slowly, agonizingly, began to adapt.
He was no longer just "unathletic"; he was pushing into "average" for his age, a painful, incremental improvement.
However Christopher was very aware that he could not simply change his body overnight.
When summer break finally began, they amped up the training. Now, Christopher pushed through five sets of forty reps for all his exercises, ending with a ten-kilometer run every single day.
He also began frequenting his personal gym.
His muscles were constantly sore, his hands calloused, his spirit tested.
He learned to push past the initial burn, to embrace the suffering, driven by the cold, hard logic of his goal.
This was no longer a war with his body, but with his mind, knowing he wanted to be stronger but becoming ever so impatient.
Akira, too, was pushing harder with his vigilante work, honing his skills on tougher targets.
He had begun targeting gangs and mob bosses.
Over these two months, they had made significant progress. Christopher's body began to tone, his frame looking a bit taller, finally reaching 5'7".
While measuring himself one day Christopher thought 'Huh I've gotten taller'
The sheer amount of free time he poured into this paid off in grudging, agonizing inches of improvement.
….
With his physical conditioning finally reaching a baseline, it was time for combat training.
Akira began teaching him various martial arts, but the real challenge came with the introduction to the Astral Arts—the secret, coveted ability to harness Astral energy.
Christopher was excited, yes, but also intensely analytical. The military would kill for their soldiers to learn this; it was a power that would allow him to stand a fighting chance against an Astra, a prospect that was both terrifying and exhilarating.
Of course this was only made possible because of the higher than military grade mana-tech which he'd taken from his parents' old lab.
Learning the Astral Arts, however, proved to be incredibly tough, fundamentally different from anything he had encountered.
Astras like Akira channeled mana instinctively, like breathing, though their mana core.
Christopher, without a mana core, had no such natural connection.
His attempts to grasp mana were frustratingly abstract. He couldn't feel it the way Akira described.
Instead, he approached it like a complex programming language, trying to decipher the rules, the syntax, the underlying code of its flow.
He used his mana-tech prototypes from his parents' company, attempting to visualize and measure the energy, trying to bypass intuition with pure data.
Misfires were common—small shocks, dizzying surges, or simply nothing at all.
Akira, watching Christopher attempt to force a non-existent connection, looked on with a mixture of confusion and awe at his friend's unique, almost scientific, approach to the impossible.
The path to harnessing the Astral Arts was not one of innate talent for Christopher, but of relentless intellectual dissection and painful, painstaking application.
This was truly the domain where his mind warred with reality, and the struggle was just beginning.
….
One afternoon, before their combat training began in earnest, Akira led Christopher to a quiet corner of the base. They knelt with Akira placing his hands on Christopher's Back.
Akira began injecting pure mana into Christopher's body. To Christopher it felt like a tingle. Running from where Akira touched him. An alien force began permeation his body.
"Close your eyes," Akira instructed, his voice low. "Try to feel the energy around you. The mana. It's everywhere."
Christopher closed his eyes, focusing, straining. He felt nothing. Only the hum of the base's ventilation and the distant city sounds.
"I don't... feel anything," he admitted, frustration already bubbling.
"You're trying too hard to think it," Akira replied gently. "Just... let go. Don't look for it, just feel."
He tried again… still failing to feel anything.
Then Christopher thought to himself.
'What if the key to control really is letting go?'
'I'm no Astra…'
Christopher focused, clearing his mind of numbers and visualization.
Then, a faint, almost imperceptible sensation began to bloom at the periphery of his awareness…
It was utterly alien, like the tingling numbness one gets when a limb has fallen asleep for too long, or the phantom buzzing after prolonged sitting.
It wasn't painful, but profoundly weird. It was a sensation of pressure without contact, a static hum just beyond hearing.
When he opened his eyes briefly, it was as if he could almost see the air, shimmering with the grainy, almost dizzying quality of old television static. This was mana.
It was fundamentally unlike any natural law he understood, a chaotic, unquantifiable energy that defied his logical framework.
It felt unnatural in the extreme, as if his senses were being fed corrupted data. Yet, it was real.
…..
When summer break finally began, they amped up the training.
Every afternoon, for those two months, Christopher stepped into a reality Akira conjured—an astral plain, a landscape spun from raw mana.
Time here was warped, hyper-accelerated to speed his training.
His very atoms seemed to hum, their processes sped up, making healing nearly instantaneous and growth almost visible.
It was, as far as Christopher understood it, a sort of temporal pocket, a space where the flow of time was drastically compressed.
Astras, with their unique connection to mana, could use it to train for what felt like years in mere hours of real time.
It was a perfect, if brutal, simulator; all the benefits of intense combat and healing without any lasting damage to his physical body in the real world.
This phenomenon put the body into a comatose state to allow for such rapid mental and physical assimilation without risk of overload.
Over those two months, Christopher spent what felt like a year inside the astral plain due to time working differently.
….
The day his training in there began, he was given one objective: to survive.
Akira rushed at him with his flame jets, a red blur moving with a speed Christopher could only hope to reach, launching a menacing roundhouse kick.
His reflexes screamed that he couldn't dodge, but he ducked, the wind of Akira's passing barely grazing his hair.
He rolled forward, desperate to create distance, but Akira's superior battle sense was already in motion. He was coming at Christopher at supersonic speed, and as Christopher analyzed his movements and posture, he could tell Akira was going for an axe kick.
Christopher used something Akira had taught him: a technique used by many Astral practitioners, releasing one's bloodlust or killing intent.
Akira flinched for a split second, a reaction almost imperceptible.
Christopher used this chance to slide to the left along the flat grassy plain.
'Grass Huh. Damn he could've given me a chance to check my surroundings.'Christopher thought.
This wasn't a fight, but rather a game of cat and mouse meant to test him. Suddenly, Christopher felt slow and weak as a wave of oppressive power washed over his body.
'Some instructor he is.. I should stop buying him dinner for this…'
'Damn cheap skate!'
His muscles screamed; he knew what this was—Akira's killing intent, amplified to pin him.
This split second was enough time for Akira to land a solid hit to his chest.
Christopher was sent flying by the kick, the sheer force of an Astra's superior physical capabilities painfully evident.
This was precisely why Akira couldn't train him like this in the real world.
A searing agony tore through Christopher's gut, leaving him gasping, clutching his chest.
It was caved in and his lungs had collapsed.
This was raw, visceral pain that forced a coughing fit, staining the vibrant grass crimson.
But then, as the soul piercing agony hit. He screamed in pain.
Gasping where breaths could not be found.
The pain then slowly began to recede till it was almost a ghostly echo, from searing pain which made him want to dig his nails into his palms to a near euphoric tingle.
His healing began as his trachea knit itself back into existence.
His bronchi followed and then the walls of his lungs were reconstructed from nothing at an atomic level.
Then he could finally gulp air into his body. The wound kept healing; his shattered ribcage mending itself and the splinters of bone being extracted and repurposed for his new breastbone.
The singular ribs followed and then his lost muscle fibers being sewn together as if mending fabric.
Lastly the skin and glands and meager chest hair which he'd accumulated during his lifetime. This ghastly process of bodily restoration lasted nearly five minutes.
The Astral Plain was but a brutal mercy.
Akira gave a sharp, knowing nod. "You feel that?" he asked, his voice calm amidst Christopher's ragged breaths.
Christopher could only nod, his chest aching where Akira's foot had connected.
"That," Akira continued, "that's what's going to keep you alive in a real fight. Fear can be a powerful force."
While outside the Astral Plain, Akira taught Christopher techniques that could work in there, but it was inside the plain that Christopher could sense mana by himself, its static hum more defined.
The next week, Christopher tried something while fighting Akira. He could dodge quicker now, and his senses had improved.
He closed his eyes mid-fight, sensing the dim particles of mana around him like fluctuating data streams,and tried with all his effort to will them towards Akira, who was coming straight towards him.
For a brief moment, none moved. He bit his lip in distress.
Then, the white bits of mana quickly shifted towards Akira, and it felt like time itself slowed as Christopher his perception was improved. He felt like his eyes could see everything clearly.
After successfully sending the pure, non-elemental mana particles his way, he then released his bloodlust at full strength.
As if interacting with the particles of mana, Christopher's aura was amplified, and Akira was left motionless for what felt like more than a second this time.
Christopher shifted his center of gravity and got into a running stance, then boosted toward Akira with his back foot, willing mana towards it.
A small crater was left from where he had launched forward.
He felt like he was being carried by the wind as he flew straight towards him.
He willed mana to form a gauntlet of pure mana around his hand.
Akira could sense his attack and reacted by setting his fist on fire and boosting forward as well.
Their attacks collided, and the ground under their feet was left shattered.
Christopher's wrist was broken. He squirmed in pain for a bit until his injury healed.
He had definitely dislocated his shoulder. Meanwhile, Akira came out without a scratch. A familiar surge of resentment, sharp and brief, pricked at Christopher—this innate power versus his hard-won, analytical control.
The temporal distortion, while accelerating his physical progress, exacted a heavy toll on Christopher's mind.
An hour in the real world stretched into days within the Plain, compressing weeks of combat simulation into agonizing mental fatigue.
His astral body would emerge toned and hardened, but the translation to his physical form was a slow, subtle shift, requiring consistent effort outside the Plain too.
Christopher realized his progress, while significant, couldn't rely solely on the Astral Plain's accelerated training. He needed fundamental, real-world combat discipline. That's when he turned to Reid, his butler, who had cared for him since he was young.