An Aura Knight is a person who essentially holds mana. Unlike a Mage, who throws fire or casts spells, an Aura Knight channels the energy inward.
In short, they reinforce their own body with mana to attack, to strengthen, to evade, to endure.
Mages shape mana outside the body. Aura Knights force it inside.
Based on that, the higher the rank of an Aura Knight, the more mana they can channel and the denser the reinforcement they can sustain.
Nobody would think a Rank 1 Aura Knight could win against a Rank 2. They simply cannot pierce the aura coating of a Rank 2.
As for why he'd pushed Derrick back then… that had been a displacement technique, not a breaking one, Lucian thought.
Iron Founding Palm.
Taught to rookies for shoving enemies back. It pushed until something moved. When nothing moved, the push came back through the only joint that could bend, and the joint lost.
Back to the topic, Lucian then took a deep breath. He began his preparation: feet planted, knees slightly bent, weight rooted directly through his heels.
The first pillar, Grounded Center, of Arthur's technique.
But this Officer Cole before him was obviously different from Derrick. He was an Iron Peak, a full stage above Derrick.
So how could he, who had no offensive technique, defeat a Rank 2 Aura Knight?
"Hooh, look at you," Travis said, seeing Lucian's stance, and smirked. But he had also begun his own preparation, taking a measured step forward.
"A 'stance,' huh?" The words came out loud, and at the same time his rear leg bent slightly, his aura, a dense grey-tinged orange, channeling into his legs.
"As expected." Travis raised his voice, loud enough for the bleachers.
He turned his head, not toward Lucian, toward the crowd, and rolled one shoulder back, letting the aura in his forearm brighten for them. "You can't even manage basic coating."
The coat.
Every Aura Knight's first technique, draw the mana up, spread it across the skin, hold it. To the sheath of a weapon for offense, to the skin for defense.
Lucian wasn't holding anything.
To everyone watching, that meant he had walked into the ring with no armor at all. One clean hit and the math was simple: shattered ribs, internal hemorrhage, a body on the sand.
A few students in the lower rows frowned. Somebody in the third row leaned over to whisper to the person beside him.
Even the proctor frowned, a small, tight crease that appeared and then didn't leave. He looked at Lucian's bare hands. Looked at the ledger. Looked at the bleachers.
Then he raised the whistle anyway.
"Begin!"
BANG!
The moment the match started, the sound of an explosion rang out. Sand blasted up and backward, and Travis's figure blurred as he exploded forward in a straight line across the ring, one arm cocked back.
Piston Lunge!
Meanwhile, Lucian's ash-grey eyes had already narrowed, tracking the blurred figure of Travis aiming for his jaw, trying to end it in one shot.
But of course he didn't sidestep. No backward movement. Not even a flinch.
A flat, unhurried gaze, locked onto Travis as he raised his left forearm into the path of the strike.
BANG!
Travis's brass-studded fist met his forearm, and the sound was loud and deep, percussive, like a heavy book dropped flat on a table.
Sand sprayed outward from Lucian's feet, and a shockwave of displaced air pushed dust across the arena floor.
Yet Lucian hadn't moved, not even a centimeter, his heels still buried in the sand. His arms hung loose. His shoulders hadn't risen. His breathing hadn't changed.
The only thing that moved on him at all was his eyes, still on Travis's face, half-lidded, unhurried, and completely unimpressed.
Hardened Skin had absorbed 35% of the force. The remaining 65% had driven straight into iron-dense bone, and with nowhere left to go, it reversed.
Got you.
THUD.
The sound came from Travis's own shoulder, his arm hammering back into its socket.
He wasn't thrown back, but he was forced to take a half-step sideways to bleed off the recoil of his own joint, boots skidding in the sand.
His arm began to drop, fingers splaying uselessly, and he stared at his own hand, then at Lucian's face. No, at his eyes, still locked on him, still calm.
He flexed the hand once. Nothing happened. He flexed it again, harder, and got maybe half a fist, fingers closing partway and stopping, like they'd forgotten the rest.
"Y-you..." Travis gritted his teeth.
Displacement versus strike.
One had taken the full reversal and shattered a wrist. The other was a piercing technique, a strike designed to hit and retract, so the force absorbed was nothing but the arm's natural spring.
It hurt, it jarred, it went numb, but it didn't destroy the joint. The difference between a bridge collapsing and a rope going slack.
Then finally, someone reacted, "W-what just happened? Did he hit him back?"
Those who held the same rank or higher understood. Those below were confused. Nobody answered, and so nobody got an answer.
Travis shook his arm out. Once again the grey-orange aura flared into his forearm.
But Lucian noticed one thing. It was thinner now. The corner of his lips curled up.
Travis's smirk was gone. In its place was nothing at all, a flat, blank face with the jaw working side to side, the way a man looks when he's trying to count something and getting a different answer each time.
He began circling left, putting distance between them. He kept rolling his right shoulder.
The crowd didn't let it go.
"What is Cole doing? Is he playing with the Croft?" Whispers erupted, but Travis Cole just ground his teeth, and then once again his figure blurred under Lucian's eyes.
This time, though, he threw a casual jab to the shoulder first, then a hook to the ribs, then a straight into the sternum. Three strikes, one after the other.
Lucian took the first two on his forearms and let the third land on his chest.
THUD.
A small sound. Quiet. It did nothing to his chest. And every time Travis threw a strike, Lucian watched the recoil travel back up his arm, a flick of the elbow, a half-step to reset.
He was taking damage from his own strikes and didn't seem to have worked it out yet.
Then Lucian caught the flicker at the edges of the coating.
The orange was starting to thin. Travis had been burning mana for over a minute now, and it was beginning to show the coating losing its shape, bleeding at the edges, ragged.
Sweat ran down from his hairline. His breathing had grown heavier. He was standing lighter on that right leg, weight shifted off it every time he reset.
Yet by quiet contrast, Lucian had not even broken a sweat.
And everyone was watching. How could they be blind?
"Why isn't he going down?"
"Why is Cole still swinging?"
"He's not even bleeding."