Days flew by. Noah spent the majority of his time in Access Point 4, getting very well acquainted with the training golem. The prediction he’d given the Devourer proved to be even more accurate than he had hoped.

With the near-unbelievable resources of the Citadel, every minute he spent practicing might as well have been an hour. The golem’s analysis of Noah’s runes and fighting style paired with its ability to show him visions of previous attempts that other people had made within Access Point 4 were invaluable.

Much of his time was spent on Astral Ruin and Concentrated Singularity. The two of them were both flawless Rank 5 Runes, but he’d used them so little that his understanding of their powers was far more limited than Unraveling Disruption — especially after his recent advancements.

But Noah’s practice went a long way in mending that problem. The two Rank 5s were surprisingly straightforward for their rank. That was a good thing. It meant they would be easy to combine when the time came to properly advance to Rank 6.

Concentrated Singularity was the clearer of the two. It was a gravity-focused rune, and Noah quickly learned that he was nowhere near as creative with it as he could have been. Access Point 4 quickly rectified that.

Unlike Unraveling Disruption, there had been a number of other gravity rune users that had sparred against the training golem — and every single one of them had a hell of a lot more experience with the magic than Noah did.

There were far more tricks to using gravity in combat than he’d ever considered. Sure, one could just point at somebody and increase the forces bearing down on them. That worked well enough when you were up against someone weaker than you… but the experts barely ever used their rune against the golem that way.

The mages who unknowingly became Noah’s teachers were far more creative than that. Trying to completely pin down an opponent was a waste of energy and effort. It was far easier — and more realistic — to just divert one of the golem’s arms rather than stop the entire thing.

But that wasn’t even the main way the majority of the gravity users put their magic to work. Almost all of them used gravity more as a way to manipulate their own position rather than that of the golem. The technique was fairly straight forward. It involved creating a point of immensely increased gravity to yank the caster out of the way of attacks.

Noah’s initial view of the rune’s usage hadn’t been too positive. He’d been confused as to why powerful mages were using what seemed to just be a fundamentally worse, jerkier version of what a wind rune could do.

It didn’t take him long to realize that wasn’t the case. The strength of gravity magic was the fact that it manipulated huge portions of a battlefield at once. And, while the user was fully in control of what was happening, everything around them was completely off balance.

Gravity magic could be offense and defense all at once. A repositioning movement was also a pulling force that yanked your opponent off guard. A dash forward could drag an enemy right into the path of your next attack.

It was terrifyingly complicated. Noah quickly became convinced that every single skilled gravity mage user was also an expert physicist. Half of their attacks came from launching stones or other objects across the room with the very same spell that they used to dodge a blow.

But being able to review what the experts had done was a huge help. Noah had no idea how long it would have taken him to figure everything out on his own, but with the aid of Access Point 4, he was able to roughly mimic some of the movement that the expert gravity users could do.

Strangely enough, Noah actually found himself taking to the new form of movement better than he would have expected. He was more than a little amused to realize the reason why. The jerky, rapid movements that gravity mages employed were incredibly similar to how his old, horrible flying sword had flown.

He’d already gotten used to getting shaken about like an ant clinging to the back of a dragonfly. This just had a few extra steps.

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But Concentrated Singularity wasn’t the only rune Noah practiced with. He spent just as much time on Astral Ruin. That one was considerably harder to get a grasp over.

Access Point 4’s visions of the past once again proved invaluable. While there were weren’t as many people who used a similar rune, there were still enough for Noah to get the initial grasp over the magic.

He’d initially thought that Astral Ruin had been meant to destroy planetary bodies or something along those lines. That, of course, would have been flat out impossible for a Rank 5 Rune. The scope was just not realistic, even in spite of its flawless creation, which meant he’d fundamentally misunderstood something about the rune’s purpose.

Access Point 4 rectified that. Noah hadn’t been completely wrong with his estimate. Astral, as it turned out, was a specific school of magic. It seemed to be a mixture of spatial, heat, stone, and metal magic. It also had some elements of gravity within it as well.

The majority of Astral Rune users seemed to be the exact opposite of those who used pure gravity runes.

In short — they ripped chunks of earth up from the ground and transformed them into blazing projectiles that they sent crashing down from every direction like a hailstorm of falling stars.

The golem had struggled a lot more against many of the Astral Rune users than it had against most of the other visions Noah reviewed. Something was off about the attacks they could put out. Their sheer destructive power was disproportionately large.

While the Golem had practically shrugged the majority of Noah’s magic off, the stars tore huge chunks of the metal monster apart every time they connected with it. It didn’t take him long to realize that Astral magic was more than just flinging fiery rocks around.

The rune’s users infused an immense amount of magic within those meteors, literally turning them into miniature stars. Such a feat was only possible if one’s runes were at least at Rank 5, which granted the user the ability to manifest pure magic without needing the components to already exist in the world around the caster, but the results spoke for themselves.

Noah also couldn’t help but notice that every single one of the Astral Rune user’s visions were far shorter than the other ones he reviewed. For all the damage they could do… they also went down incredibly fast.

Astral Rune users didn’t seem particularly concerned about defense or conserving their energy. Their main strategy was to kill whatever was unfortunate enough to be their opponent before they ran out of power or got killed themselves.

It took Noah longer than he cared to figure out exactly how to figure out how to use Astral Ruin properly. He hadn’t used the Rank 5 ability to create magic much, but there weren’t exactly stars floating around for him to pull on naturally.

He wouldn’t have said that he was anywhere near an expert of the rune’s powers. But, after the week drew to its close, Noah managed to wrestle a good grasp over it. Even though he couldn’t do much at all compared to the incredible damage that the people in the visions had pulled off — he was an entire Rank lower than the majority of them and had been practicing for a fraction of the time.

The Rank 5s weren’t the only things he dedicated his attention to for the duration of the week. In between practicing with them, Noah turned his attention to the patches of Beyond within his soul once more.

He couldn’t control them in the same way that one could direct a rune, but shaping his soul worked perfectly. Even though he wasn’t entirely sure what the strange tendrils of white magic were fully capable of, Noah could move them around at will. They were also very good at destroying things he smacked with them.

There was no doubt that the Lead Researcher’s book held a lot more information on what the Beyond was capable of… but Noah wasn’t quite at the stage where he wanted to piss the Devourer off by trying to unearth it.

He did, however, get a rather annoying surprise when he brought one of the books from the Lead Researcher’s room to the Heart to decode. Noah’s inability to read the book’s contents had nothing at all to do with the fact that Obsidia had a different language than Arbalest did.

The book hadn’t been written in another language at all.

It had been written in a cypher, and one that even the Heart itself didn’t understand. Noah was pretty sure he probably could have figured out a way to crack it if he’d had a few months and the patience to whack away at it — but he didn’t.

There were more important things on his mind. The books would have to wait until he brought the others back to the Citadel. Moxie would probably love deciphering them.

Overall, Noah was more than satisfied with his progress… and equally as eager to put it to a real test. The Citadel was an incredible training area, but there was only so long he could sit here fighting a golem when everyone was out there somewhere in Obsidia waiting for him.

The week — and his time for preparations — was over.

When the Heart’s brilliant blue light shimmered to life before Noah at the start of the next day, he had a bundle of the Researcher’s food slung over his shoulder and only a single thing on his mind.

“Show me the Beyond passages connected to the Citadel,” Noah said, an eager grin splitting his lips. It was finally time. “I’m going to Obsidia.”