Arcane Exfil-Chapter 51: Mind Over Matter (1)

Arcane Exfil-Chapter 51: Mind Over Matter (1)

For once, Cole actually needed an alarm to get up on time. His sleep quality last night, unsurprisingly, was unequivocally ass. But he didn’t have much room to complain; the dark circles under Mack’s eyes as he slumped at the dining table confirmed that he had it far worse.
The whole breakfast setup felt like a stage production of normalcy – not ideal, but Cole had to admit that it was preferable to a lot of other alternatives. Lisara had gone full American comfort food: the classic breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast, and pancakes. As if carbs and protein could somehow patch whatever had cracked yesterday.
Everyone showed up at seven sharp like they’d been programmed; nobody wanted to be the first to break routine – not after last night.
Mack had managed to shave and put on clean clothes, which was something. The effort itself was the message:
I’m trying
. He took coffee black, no sugar to soften the bitterness, and loaded his plate with exactly one of everything. Not enough to actually fuel a grown man, but enough to get by; enough to participate in the social contract of breakfast.
The rest of them took normal portions and pretended not to notice.
And even worse, nobody had said a peep since their morning greetings. Only Ethan had said something, saying grace for food – but again, that was routine.
Cole figured someone had to get the conversation moving before the silence calcified.
“So…” Cole started. He kept his tone conversational, like this was just any other morning. “We talked about plans last night and we’re thinking we do some light training today. Hit up Lady Verna, see what she’s got for us.”
“Sounds good.” Mack’s voice came out like he’d gargled gravel, but at least it came out.
Cole wasn’t gonna let that ray of hope slip from his grasp. Time to deploy the magic card, literally – Mack’s own reliable enthusiasm. “Elina showed us some telekinesis last night. Lifted our asses up and had us floating around.”
“All three of us,” Ethan clarified, still looking mildly haunted by the experience. “At the same time, no less.”
Elina’s knife paused mid-bacon-surgery – leave it to a noblewoman to take a knife to bacon. “I daresay they relished it far more than they’ll confess, however their tongues may protest.”
Mack’s lips curved, ever so slightly. It wasn’t enough, but Cole appreciated it nonetheless; progress was progress, after all.
Miles, predictably, jumped in. “Well… Can’t lie – bein’ up there was a kick. Don’t mean I want a repeat, though.”
That’s when Mack finally surfaced. “So… six hundred pounds give or take. For how long? What’s the upper limit?”
“But a few minutes,” Elina supplied. “My limit is a thousand pounds, perhaps, though the theoretical ceiling is yet undefined.”
“Huh.” Mack set down his fork, and for a second his face shifted away from emotionless nothingness, inching closer to genuine interest. “So you're saying… we can use the Force?”
Cole nodded. “Yup. Even the average person can. I think it’s what, twenty pounds, according to Elina? Fifty if they really work at it.” Cole let himself warm to the topic, matching Mack’s energy. “For us, we can probably get to a good few hundred pounds with practice; maybe more.”
“Well, shit.” Mack leaned on the table, finishing his portion and even getting seconds. “The applications though… Holding a scalpel in place while your hands do something else, construction, daily convenience. Hell, imagine never having to get up for the remote again. Not like there are any remotes around here, but still.”
“Living the dream,” Cole agreed.
Elina cleared her plate. “Quite. Ask Mrs. Guinnosa; I recommended the very same to the others.”
“Magic Roombas.” Cole couldn’t help himself.
Even Mack cracked a grin at that one. The mood around the table shifted just a fraction, like someone had opened a window in a stuffy room.
They finished up without much more conversation, but it felt less like walking on eggshells. Mack managed the seconds – damn good progress by any reasonable metric.
Cleanup went quick; everyone just dumped their plates in the kitchen for later. They filed out to the Forea, and Mack took his usual spot without hesitation. The ride to OTAC passed in actual quiet – not the suffocating kind from breakfast but the comfortable silence of people who’d found their equilibrium again, however temporary.
Elina split ways when they arrived, heading off to check on the post-possessed men from Kidry.
They found Verna in her office, and to say that she was merely surrounded by yesterday’s incident s would have been a gross understatement. Rather, her office looked like a paper bomb had detonated – documents scattered across every surface.
She glanced up when they knocked, and Cole caught her rapid assessment. Her tired eyes lingered on Mack just long enough to catalog the obvious – exhaustion, forced functionality, basic hygiene maintained – before shifting to neutral.
“Good morning, Heroes. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Mornin’. We were hoping to get some training in.” Cole kept it straightforward. “Specifically learning telekinesis, if you’re available.”
Verna leaned back in her chair. “How fortuitous, as I found myself quite at liberty this morning. No dispatches requiring attention, no s to file, nothing whatsoever demanding my time.”
The sarcasm came out dry as week-old bread, but Cole could tell she wasn’t actually put out. Just busting their balls, if that smile was anything to go by.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
It flew over Elina, though. “We may return anon, should the moment prove –”
Verna held up a hand. “I jest. Come, then.” She stood and brought them outside the office. “I’ve been at these wretched s since dawn. You've rather rescued me from tedium.”
She led them down to the training space they’d used before. Once everyone had spread out with decent spacing between them, she conjured a firebolt without ceremony.
“
Telekinesis
,” she began. “It is something all mages wield, most of them unconsciously, perhaps.” The flame hovered motionless above her palm, casting shifting shadows across her face.
“Whenever you cast – fire, water, or any other element – you are not moving flame, but compelling matter itself. The element is but the surface; the true act is force of mind, which others have chosen to call
telekinesis
.”
Cole formed his own firebolt, watching it dance above his hand. He’d done this hundreds of times, maybe thousands. Never really thought about the mechanism behind it – only the mechanisms around it. Magic was magic, right? He grabbed the mana, he grabbed what he needed, and poof! A flame. At that point, it was just a matter of ‘how do I direct this at the target.’
But now that Verna mentioned it… yeah, there was something else there. The fire itself was just transformed mana and matter, but the throwing? That was separate. He’d been so focused on the flashy part – rocket-inspired thrust and fragmentation and pressure – that he’d ignored the mundane part of actually moving it around.
“Every spell rests upon the same fulcrum: the moment imagination yields, and compulsion takes its place.” She drew her arm back like she was about to toss a fastball, but the flame stayed perfectly still above her palm. “That is
will
become
force
. Attend to it.”
Cole mimicked the motion, muscle memory from both baseball and lobbing grenades. But he held the flame back, keeping it suspended despite his body yearning to release it.
There. Right there. It was distinct mental pressure, like flexing a muscle he’d never noticed before. He’d been doing it unconsciously every time he cast, but just as Verna pointed it out, he could feel the exact moment where thought became force.
“Maintain it. See how the flame is held, how it is governed. That act of restraint –
that
is telekinesis:
will
imposed upon
matter
.”
Cole held the firebolt steady, examining what he’d been doing all along. The force component had always been there – embarrassingly, he’d just never really thought to separate it from everything else. Why didn’t he think of that?
It was hindsight’s cruel gift: what was hidden then had now become painfully obvious.
When he was focused on thrust dynamics and compressing the flames as hard as he could, the basic push-pull barely registered. It ran underneath, invisible – just another part of the system.
“Now release it, but govern the velocity. Send it forth slowly.”
Cole eased off the restraint, letting the flame drift forward at walking pace. He controlled the acceleration instead of applying the usual explosive release – like the difference between stomping the gas and easing into traffic. The principle was simple enough: modulate force instead of dumping it all at once.
“Now halt it.”
Cole applied counter-force, bringing the flame to a stop about ten feet out. It saw a bit of minor wobble on the deceleration – the same thing that often plagued new drivers, pressing the brake a bit too hard instead of smoothly rolling to a stop. It was the sort of thing that lost points on a driving test but didn’t matter much in practice like this.
The firebolt hung there, waiting for input.
Boring, but useful for developing fine control, Cole supposed. Maybe it could even see some niche applications for curved shots or synchronized attacks. Other than that, he’d be bullshitting if he called it anything other than simply ‘building the fundamentals.’
“Draw it back.”
Pull instead of push. Cole reversed the force vector, drawing the flame back to his hand in a smooth, easy arc.
They ran through the basics quickly: push, pull, lateral movement, circles. Within minutes everyone had it down. After all, this was just conscious application of forces they’d been using unconsciously for months. By the end of the practice session, Miles had his firebolt doing loop-de-loops overhead like some kind of flaming lasso.
“Well,” Verna chuckled. “Let us move on, then. What you’ve learned is applied much the same across elements. Observe.”
She gestured, and water rose from a nearby basin, separating into a dozen floating spheres. Each one moved independently, weaving between each other like a sophisticated section of freeway.
“As with juggling, multiple objects require partitioned concentration,” she explained.
The parallels were pretty obvious, even without her saying it outright. Cole actually found it easier in some ways – the fluid nature meant that rigid control wasn’t as vital, and telekinesis meant that he wasn’t limited to just two hands. Within a few minutes he had six water spheres orbiting his position at different speeds and trajectories, like a miniature solar system.
Ice came next. It was basically the same as water but with solid form. The only real difference was accounting for shape; irregular ice chunks required adjusting force distribution to prevent unwanted rotation.
“Now to earth,” Verna announced, “wherein lies the true trial of strength.”
She was right. Moving a fist-sized rock felt like nothing, but when Cole tried to lift a boulder the size of an office chair, the resistance hit immediately. It wasn’t merely the rock being heavy; that much was expected. Rather, it was the mental strain of anchoring that much force, akin to the difference between picking up a pencil and benching two-fifty.
“It is not force that fails you,” Verna observed as they strained against the stones, “but the mind’s strength to hold its ground. Strain past that measure, and you will swoon long before the stone is moved.”
Cole managed to get his boulder about three feet up before the strain became too much. His body felt fine, but his brain on the other hand… he’d kill for an ibuprofen right about now. He let it drop with a satisfying thud.
“Twenty pounds for common folk,” Mack muttered, wrestling with his own rock. “Fifty with practice. Looks like we’re already past that, huh?”
Verna shrugged. “Well, between the months behind you and this very drill, you do not begin from naught; a novice without either would find even a teacup an impediment.”
They worked with progressively larger stones, and naturally it turned into a dick-measuring contest. Cole managed to sustain about two hundred pounds before his brain started screaming – respectable, but he could see Miles eyeing his rock and reaching for something bigger.
“That all ya got?” Miles grunted, wrestling up what had to be close to three hundred. The smug bastard held it for maybe five seconds before dropping it with a string of curses, but the point was made.
Mack wasn't even trying to compete, working steady with a moderate load. Cole couldn’t really blame him, considering last night. Ethan hit about one-fifty and seemed content with it; he never was one for the testosterone Olympics anyway.
Verna laughed softly, shaking her head. “Very good – but enough with the elements. Let us see what happens when there is nothing so obliging.”
She pulled a collection of objects out of a box – wooden spheres, metal cubes, and stuffed toys resembling a variety of animals. “These are not of the elements. Let us see how you fare with them.”

Chapter 51: Mind Over Matter (1)