Shard's Secondary Magic Training [Private]

It was finally time. Time to face a challenge that he had been putting off for a while. He'd tried to do it a couple of years ago, but his strength had not been great enough and so he was forced to treat. He'd been meaning to come here with his former team Kvasir. However, after Jin and Kaya upped and vanished he had lost a lot of motivation and the team had fallen apart. However, recently as a reward for some cooking he did he was given a pair of rather special gauntlets and with these gauntlets he hoped he would be able to deal with the situation at hand. Of course, it would still be difficult, but hopefully it wasn't impossible. As such he'd set sail one evening after getting permission to go on leave for a short while.

He'd arrived on the Shadow Island at what would probably be dawn on a small skiff. It had taken some time to get here, longer than he thought, but he'd been given permission to be away from the guild for a while as his attitude wasn't really helping people at the moment. He took a deep breath as he stepped off of the boat and onto the shore, the sand crackling beneath his feet. Seemingly without much effort he dragged the boat further onto the shore and then tied it to a nearby tree. Unless the rope snapped or the tree broke then even if the tide came in his boat wasn't going anywhere.

He took another deep breath and looked about him before pausing. "I'm....on the wrong side of the island." he said at last and then sighed deeply. "This is what I get for trying to navigate solo. I wish Kaya was here." Yes, with her nose here he was almost certain he wouldn't get lost. Unfortunately, that wasn't an option. She was gone.

He sighed deeply again and began to head through the dense forest towards where he hoped the cave would be. He knew it wasn't on this side of the island. In fact he knew exactly where it was or at least he knew what the area near it looked like. Last time, the first time he had ever been here, he had been lucky enough to come ashore as close as possible to the cave. This time he really had been unlucky as he was nowhere near it. That he was almost certain of. In fact, as was mentioned earlier, by the look of the land he was probably on the opposite side.

He picked up the pace as he got into the forest. He didn't want to waste too much time here. Plus he knew that there plenty of big and dangerous monsters in here. Ones he didn't want to fight. That was not why he was here. Though perhaps once he was done with his quest he might try and find a certain few. Generally, mythical beast meat made some really good stir fry.

As he ran he suddenly leaped to the side dodging a huge tongue that tried to strike him. The tongue quickly retracted to reveal that it was one of the more dangerous creatures of the island, but not the most dangerous. A salamander sphinx. The source of the legendary mellow cola. The question was whether it currently had any fermenting in its body or if he'd missed it. The cola fermented over the course of a year and if you managed to make the creature cry in the right way then you got the best cola ever, or at least so it was said. He'd almost died when he'd tried to get it last time.

It made a small gesture with its paw and suddenly his arm was sliced open and the ground around him was torn up. The slight movement seemed to be a strike that launched an air blade despite the miniscule movement. He clutched a hand to the damaged arm. He didn't want to fight the sphinx, but it seemed he had no choice. With a quick motion he drew from his wrist a white ribbon and tied it to his brow. "Ready...steady...cook."