Instigation

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Part 2 Chapter 17

Nine months had passed since Jack had gathered a house full of followers to take a step in defeating the light.  Jack had virtually become a new, unrecognizable man in the time that had past.  His physical power had seemingly doubled under the training of the Underground.  Where before he was always a rather strong fighter, now he employed a destructive magical offense that was currently unmatched.  Gabriela would be the first to tell any person that Jack trained harder than anyone.  By day he trained physically eight hours at a time, and then he would come home and do mental training for another four hours.  His intelligence of the world around him had also grown significantly; he was no longer the naïve young man that entered the courtroom nine months before.  He was now the politician his parents sought out to make him, the leader, the man.  His mind training was more than just studying and learning, he had been practicing the mental combat that Samuel had introduced him to.  Thankfully Samuel was now an accomplished mind magician, which allowed him to teach Jack everything he knew.  This was of course the one category that being a sorcerer did not help the remaining Wilder to excel.  This sport was all about Will, and brain power.  Thankfully Jack had a lot of Will, and he was working his hardest to build the brain power.

Jack’s control over his magic was now simply amazing compared to what it was.  He could now lift different objects to different heights at the exact same time.  Alastor and Jack mentally sparred with swords using magic.  Neither would actually grip the sword, but their magic would control the sword until first blood was drawn.  For the first eight months Jack lost every fight against Alastor like this, mostly because Alastor had superior control, and didn’t need raw power to back his skill.  Now however Jack could win one in about every ten fights.  It was clearly luck, but Jack was willing to take what he could get.

Patrick helped Jack with the raw power aspect of their training.  Patrick had been promoted to a teacher for the USDA, so now he was teaching a power combat class that Samuel and Jack starred in.  Interestingly enough, for the most part everything was done in partners, giving Jack and Samuel the ability to accomplish monumental task.  For example on the third month of training, Jack and Samuel were forced to bring a train to a complete stop.  They failed eighteen times before they lifted the train off its tracks in mid motion and willed the machine to stop in its track.  Patrick told Jack after class that day that three of them could probably take a small building out of the ground, and one day that they might even be able to metaphorically Move Mountains.

Jack had been forced into a political role of leadership.  At every government council meeting Jack would assert his authority and once more climb towards the mantle of the leader of the light.  As of right now there is no official leader, even though everyone knows it will one day be Jack.  Tiberius and the others had taken the responsibility of holding down the fort until the others deemed Jack as a true leader, and ready to lead the forces of the light.  This pissed Lord Altin off to no end.  He often attempted to belittle Jack’s knowledge of the magical world by claiming that Jack was far too young to understand such complicated and delicate matters.  Jack however calmly pointed out that it was the young leadership of the past that brought this society to what it was.  Jack was taught that Arthur Pendragon was leading Camelot’s finest by the time he was sixteen, and became king no later than his twentieth birthday.  Lord Altin of course attempted to refute this by saying that the older you are the more wisdom you have to share.  Being the witty man that Jack was he told Lord Altin that the only things that come with old age is being slow and senile.  This would cause an eruption of laughter on both sides, and Jack grinning like a school boy at the nearly ruptured vein in Lord Altin’s head.

Tiberius played a large role in these changes.  He helped teach Jack everything he needed to know about how the government worked, and how it was changing overtime.  Notably Tiberius pointed out that this was the youngest government in our society’s history.  With Julian taking the position of Lord Creed and Tatiana taking the mantle of Lady Pernelle, more than half of the light side of the government was ruled by men and women under the age of twenty five.

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