Ludger nodded once as if that confirmed everything.
Tali lowered the halberd from her shoulder and rested its base against the ground, both hands settling on the shaft as she spoke.
“I’ve been thinking about what I’m actually good for in a fight,” she said. “Not just what I can do, but what I should do.”
Ludger stayed quiet. That was already better thinking than half the guild managed on a good day.
Tali continued, more serious now. “I don’t want to be stuck doing only one thing. I can already hold my own up close, but if I only focus on that, then I’m just another person in the line.”
Her fingers shifted slightly along the halberd.
“I wanted to offer long-range support with wind magic,” she said. “Not just throwing attacks for the sake of it, but helping from farther away when I need to.”
She lifted the weapon a little and made a small cutting motion, enough for a faint current to stir around the blade’s edge before fading.
“And I wanted to use the halberd with it too. Not separately. Together.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed a fraction in interest. Tali noticed and straightened slightly, as if encouraged.
“If I do it right,” she said, “I should be able to disrupt groups instead of only focusing on one enemy at a time. Push them off balance. Ruin their footing. Break formations. Make space for the others. Hit from farther out without giving up my close-range style.”
Her smile returned, smaller this time but sharper.
“I don’t need it to kill everything by itself. I just want to make a mess in the right places.”
Ludger stared at her for a moment. That was… Actually good. More than good.
Not flashy for the sake of being flashy. Not some childish obsession with making her attacks look cooler. She was thinking about battlefield role, pressure, control, reach, and how to combine her strengths into something that made the people around her more dangerous too.
Which meant she had either grown a lot recently… Or someone had finally managed to knock enough sense into her to aim that growth properly. Possibly both. Ludger lowered his hand from his chin.
“And the bursts?” he asked. “You’re trying to cut with the wind itself, or just use it to strengthen the weapon path?”
Tali’s expression shifted into something more focused immediately.
“Both,” she said. “At first I was only trying to reinforce motion. Make the swings faster. Lighter. Harder to stop.” She grimaced faintly. “But Kaela told me that was too narrow, and Renvar said if I was going to use wind, I should stop thinking like a brawler holding a long stick.”
Ludger almost smiled at that. That did sound like Renvar.
“So now,” Tali went on, “I’m trying to make the wind do more than follow the swing. I want it to peel outward from the blade, or gather around the path and hit wider than the weapon itself.”
She gestured toward the training ground ahead.
“Not enough to waste mana. Just enough to make people react wrong.”
Ludger looked at the torn dust lines, the light marks scattered through the yard, and then back at her halberd.
A disruption fighter. Mid-range pressure. Formation control. Long-range support when needed. Close-range lethality if ignored.
Again, actually good. He let the silence hang for a moment before speaking.
“So you’re building something annoying for your enemies.”
Tali blinked.
Then she grinned. “That’s a compliment coming from you, right?”
“Yes.”
Her grin widened immediately.
Ludger glanced once more at the weapon, then at the way she was holding it now, less like someone practicing random drills and more like someone already beginning to understand what sort of fighter she wanted to become.
“Show me again,” he said.
Tali’s shoulders straightened at once. The proud look returned. This time, it carried a little hunger with it too.
She stepped back into position, fingers tightening around the halberd, while Ludger stood there with sore arms, a tired body, and a mind suddenly much more awake than it had been a moment ago.
The northerners could wait. This was worth watching. Tali stepped back, rolled her shoulders once, and shifted her grip on the halberd.
“Alright,” she said, a little more energized now that Ludger was actually paying attention. “I’ll show you a few ways I’ve been trying to use it.”
Ludger gave a short nod.
“Then tell me what looks wrong.”
“Most things probably.”
Tali made a face. “That’s not helpful.”
She snorted, then moved.
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The halberd spun again, but this time she wasn’t just drilling motions. She was showing intent.
One sequence began with a low sweep that stirred a ribbon of wind across the ground in front of her, enough to kick dust up and suggest how it might ruin footing in a larger fight. She flowed out of it into a diagonal cut, and the edge carried a sharper burst outward, not strong enough to kill from range, but definitely enough to force someone to react. Then she planted the rear end of the shaft, pivoted around it, and unleashed a broad circular swing that scattered air in a wider arc around her body.
“This one is for enemies getting too close at once,” she said, still moving. “Even if the hit doesn’t land cleanly, I want the wind to force them back or mess up how they step in.”
Ludger watched in silence. Tali transitioned again. This time she thrust forward and let compressed wind travel ahead of the halberd’s point in a narrow blast.
“And this one is more for interrupting,” she said. “Not killing. Just throwing someone off before they can finish a spell or charge in properly.”
Then she shifted into another stance and slashed twice in quick succession, trying to let the wind follow a half-step after the physical motion instead of simply riding with it.
“That one still feels awkward,” she admitted. “But I thought if I can delay the wind a little, it might make the timing harder to read.”
That was not a bad thought either.
Ludger narrowed his eyes slightly as he followed the sequence.
Tali finished with a final spin, the halberd humming through the air while small bursts of wind peeled off around her in uneven but deliberate ripples. Then she stopped, exhaled, and looked at him.
“Well?”
Ludger didn’t answer. For a second, he just stared. Not really at her. Not even at the weapon.
His expression shifted into something rarer than surprise and more annoying than confusion, a kind of baffled stillness, as if some piece of logic had just struck him late and he didn’t appreciate being caught off guard by it.
Then the system moved. A familiar pulse ran through him. A new line appeared.
[Class Obtained: Wind Warrior + 05 INT, + 05 DEX, + 05 STR]
His eyes flicked slightly. Another followed almost immediately.
[Skill Obtained: Wind Swing]
Ludger went completely still.
Tali blinked. “...Ludger?”
He barely heard her. For the briefest moment, his mind snagged on the obvious truth so hard it almost irritated him. He had never really considered it before. Not properly.
He knew he could learn from combat. From observation. From practice. From teachers. From instinct. From pushing his own body until the system decided he had earned the right to call his suffering progress.
But this… This also made sense.
If one of his students developed a genuine fighting style, something real, something coherent, something with enough structure and individuality behind it, then there was no reason he shouldn’t be able to gain something from that path too.
Not because he had created it himself. But because he had become part of the chain that shaped it.
Teacher. Student. Growth. Development. A style taking form under his eye, and the system acknowledging that it was real enough to be learned from.
That... was useful. And slightly absurd.
Tali lowered the halberd a little. “What’s wrong?”
Ludger’s eyes refocused on her. For a fraction of a second, he considered telling her. Then he decided against it immediately.
“Nothing,” he said.
Tali stared at him with the deeply unconvinced expression of someone who had clearly just watched his face do something strange. Ludger ignored that. Instead, he looked at the points where her movement had almost opened her up, then at the flow of mana around the weapon.
“In any case,” he said evenly, “if you want to use this without creating openings, your casting speed needs to improve.”
Tali straightened a little.
Ludger continued, now fully in analysis mode. “Your idea is good. The wind is useful. The timing variation is useful. The disruption aspect is useful.” He pointed toward the space around her right flank. “But when you layer the spell into the weapon path, there’s still a short delay where your focus splits too much. Against weaker enemies, that won’t matter. Against anyone decent, it will.”
Tali frowned and looked down at her stance, replaying it in her head.
Ludger went on. “Right now, you’re still adding wind magic to your attacks. That means the cast and the swing are close together, but not fully one motion yet. That hesitation is your problem.”
She nodded slowly.
“If you speed up the casting part,” Ludger said, “most of your base problems get covered. Less delay. Less exposure. Smoother transitions between close-range and support. You’ll keep the disruption while making it much harder for someone to punish you for using it.”
Tali’s eyes sharpened as she absorbed that.
Then satisfaction spread across her face.
“So if I get faster,” she said, “the whole style becomes harder to read and harder to interrupt.”
“Yes.”
“And I won’t need to sacrifice as much positioning for the wind output.”
“Yes.”
“And that means I can keep pressure on groups without giving a strong opponent a free chance to step in.”
Ludger nodded once. “That should cover most of your bases.”
Tali grinned. It was the grin of someone who had just received exactly the confirmation she wanted.
“Got it,” she said, tightening her grip on the halberd again. “I’ll work on that.”
Ludger gave a small nod, but inwardly his thoughts were already somewhere else.
Wind Warrior.
Wind Swing.
Interesting. Very interesting. Apparently, teaching people until they built something real could feed him classes too.
That opened up possibilities. A lot of them.
Tali, meanwhile, looked completely pleased with herself, already running through the correction in her head like a fighter who had just found the next piece of the road ahead.
Ludger watched her reset her stance. For once, the expression on his face stayed perfectly calm. There was no reason to let her know that a few minutes of watching her practice had just handed him a new class.
Ludger stayed where he was and watched Tali resume her practice. She adjusted quickly.
That was one of the better things about her. Once she received useful advice, she did not waste time defending mistakes or pretending she had meant to do them that way. She simply took the correction, turned it over in her head, and went back to work.
Her halberd moved again.
The motions still had that strange in-between quality, part drill, part dance, part battlefield concept trying to claw its way into reality. Wind curled around the weapon in sharper bursts now that she was consciously trying to compress the casting time. It was still rough. Still uneven. But Ludger could already see where it was heading.
And while he watched her train, another thought kept circling in the back of his mind. Could he level the class to one hundred before Tali herself fully developed the style?
That was an absurd thought. Which, naturally, meant it was worth considering seriously. His expression remained calm, but his mind was already moving.
If Wind Warrior had truly come from observing Tali’s fighting path take shape, then there was a chance the class itself was still immature. Incomplete. More seed than finished tree. Tali had the foundation, yes, but her style was far from fully formed. There were openings in it, uncertain transitions, inefficient mana flow, and obvious room for growth in both range and application.
Yet the system had still acknowledged it. That meant one of two things.
Either the threshold for class creation, or acquisition, was lower than he had assumed…
Or the system had already seen enough to judge the direction of the style rather than its final form.
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