* * *
Kilniara shivered in Joe’s lap as he playfully bathed her in his mana once or twice more before he retreated diligently to his training. Kilniara sighed as she felt his presence fade, lost in his thought and training. She tried to join in her own training, but found herself so much more excited about what she had learned. She’d long realized that she was completely lost to Joe, her love for him beyond any safe bounds, but the shock of his mana touch on her still drove straight through her core. She’d always known that the mana of a lover was … exquisite. There were plenty of her friends who had chosen the adventurer’s life who let her know how exciting that was, but knowing intellectually fared poorly in comparison to the actual experience. It had been wonderful, and she shivered once again at the remembrance before stilling, not wishing to interrupt his diligent training.
What was more exciting, though, was Joe’s reaction. His shiver, the gasp, the quiver through his body even as his eye’s flickered shut in his own pleasure let her know that his feelings for her were undeniable. Although, all guys probably react to a pretty girl like that Kilniara snickered softly before quieting once again. But his was… a bit more than normal, right? Kilniara tried to convince herself. He’s got feelings for… he must… he must. She ended with fervor.
Grimacing in effort and no small part in her lack of desire to move on to more productive topics and actions, she tore her mind away from the joyful proof of Joe’s feelings for her and turned to her own training. Quickly losing herself in the mind numbing effort of mana expression, she quickly noticed that Joe proved the results of training, his mana much deeper than hers, and rejuvenating so much faster, even. She took quite some time to recover her own mana before quickly losing it in her own expression training. Joe remained deep in thought the whole time, expressing over much longer periods than her, but recovering much quicker, despite his much deeper mana well. Soon, the two boys began stirring and Kilniara stood reluctantly to return to her room before they awoke. Joe came to with her rise, and quickly reached out to grasp her in a hug.
“Heading in to get ready?”
“Hmm… Don’t want to, but they’re waking. Time to get going.”
Joe smiled at her a bit before reaching forward and kissing her lightly, if a bit more intimately than a peck, before letting her go, “See you soon.”
Kilniara smiled and dashed away, her giddiness returning quickly with the realization that his feelings for her were genuine. She stopped by the basin to splash her face quickly before heading downstairs to the inn common room. She waited politely there for a time, hearing the soft scraping and bumps as her brother and Garnedell woke, preparing for the day. Several minutes later, the door opened quietly and she heard their low voices speaking as they walked not so quietly down the stairs.
Joe remained silent, as always, and walked down the stairs behind them. When they made the common room, they too noticed Kilniara sitting there and Garnedell was kind enough to wave at Kilniara while Zilnek mostly ignored her. She sighed and ignored him in turn.
“Let’s head out to finish of our forms,” Joe spoke out, completely ignoring how her brother treated her.
The two boys grumbled, sleep still heavy upon them, but Kilniara followed out excitedly as Joe joined them after. The shuffled quietly into the back before heading outside and training. Joe had them lining up in the quite large courtyard where he then had them run through their forms, stopping to help each of them before turning to his own training diligently. Kilniara fell into her forms and once again felt some frustration over the minor corrections that Joe imparted, each seeming worthless as she already had perfectly recreated her movements from watching him. How can I be making any mistakes?
Despite that, he somehow found fault in all three and diligently corrected them, spending significant time on each of them before returning to his own movements again and again throughout the morning. By the time they’d finished their training, all three of them had long lost their endurance and yet Joe still pushed them before calling an end to their training, the three sweating profusely by the end. So...strange ... is sweat the secret to Joe's power? His clan's secret? She slid her hand across her arm and felt the odd water on her fingers. What is it? Why does it come for our skin? Her thoughts interrupted as she turned to follow the others out, Joe calling for them to return to the room to to bathe again, although Master still proved to be a master, unfazed by their difficult workout and not sweating in almost any noticeable way.
Despite that, he took a bath with them, graciously willing to hide their shameful performance in not being able to keep up with him. They soon found themselves back down at the breakfast table for a very early breakfast before heading out the door and on their way to the dungeons once again.
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* * *
“Go ahead and get in line at the dungeon. I’ll be there soon,” Joe offered to the other three with a nod.
“OK,” Garnedell called out quickly while Zilnek simply grunted, obviously still exhausted.
Kilniara looked at him with some expectation, her eyes almost hooded with lust left over from this morning and Joe hid his grin, only allowing a small, and a bit shy, smile show before shaking his head and nodding towards the two boys.
“Go ahead with them. I’ll be going real quick.”
“But… I thought…”
Joe frowned, “I need to head to the temple fast… I’ll be back soon.”
Kilniara frowned, and Joe knit his eyebrows, “What?”
Kilniara noticed then frowned in turn, “I thought… you wanted to offer me a combat job?”
Realization hit Joe and his face lit up, “Oh! Yeah… I forgot. Thanks for reminding me! Ha! Yeah… lets head out. Wanna join me?”
Kilniara pouted with faux anger before smirking and walking up to him, swishing her tail and hips in a saucy manner that proved more alluring than Joe felt it had any right to be. Joe snorted and shook his head as he turned away, but Kilniara heard and glanced up at him before laughing brightly as she sidled into his side.. Joe heard her laughter and glanced down, seeing her smirk only grow in confidence before turning and walking straight on with her arm in his. Joe flared his nostrils as his breath caught, a quick intake slipping into his lungs even as he willed control to suffuse him and calm his own reaction as he felt the flush of red climb his cheeks and really didn’t want that showing. Despite his best efforts, he still felt a hint of a burn and had to clench some teeth while pretending to be fine.
Kilniara looked back up at him and her flirty arrogance changed to one of happy joy being with him, and the two soon relaxed and fell into a meaningless but happy conversation with one another on the way to the temples. He found his thoughts completely distracted, maintaining the conversation but his focus was on Kilniara and her strange turn to such confidence, which proved quite appealing to him. It was with surprise that the next time he looked up and was aware of his surroundings, he was in the plaza of temples and had to take a moment to collect himself.
Right… should probably change my job first… then… uh… yeah… let’s double down… do Kilniara’s in the temple of Mimir… no need to hide… just … just a weird eccentric… and then maybe Kukurnal will … hmm… trying to hide this is probably a bad idea, so… yeah…
“I’ll meet you back here, OK? I need to head over there, then we’ll go into the temple of Mimir and swap your job… or try to, OK?”
Kilniara grinned up at him, her excitement growing, “Ok!”
Joe snorted and turned away before sweeping the cloak over him and heading into the temple, thoughts deep into his choices. What about the teacher job. Seems like it would be great to help the others level quickly. It should work that way, right? Or is it more… Wait, even in the best case scenario where I’m helping them level super fast, I’ll be stuck using that job cause I can’t use the skills unless they're 'char:' or until they’re level one and I don’t have a 'char:' to spare... so… But… huh… I did get my bow up pretty fast then I could… wait… Joe flipped open his other jobs and took a look at the skills listed for other jobs and noticed that pretty much the only skills that had meaningfully grown were his combat skills: bow and cudgel. He had grown them quite significantly but remembered that cudgel took more than a couple hundred, almost three hundred, kills and that the growth was not tied to his experience gain. It took almost two or three kills to grow his cudgel, and he’d swung the weapon almost a dozen times each fight which put him at using the cudgel around three thousand times to get his skill to level one. So why did the bow… oh… Leveling up hunter took more than a single day, and he’d fought much stronger monsters with his bow like the bear and the bandits who tried to ambush the camp site. Higher core mobs give better experience, so… do they do the same for skills? Wait… that only works for combat skills! None of… Joe sighed as he looked over the other skills and realized all of them were remarkably under leveled or not leveled at all.
His cudgel skill hadn’t been leveled at all when he decided to work on that for his double learning skill. It was at zero, right? Joe paused, uncertain before dismissing it. The exact number didn’t really matter as he had several other examples where skills seemed to require significant effort compared to the actually leveling of jobs. Time spent in the job doesn’t seem to matter. I was almost a month doing commoner but my cudgel didn’t budge. I was using the spear almost the whole time. And I was hunter only a couple of days… maybe a week, and I got the bow up… massive jumps at a time when I killed the bears and hunters. So, doing hard stuff compared to what I can do helps a lot, but how am I going to teach a ‘hard’ thing? All my other skills didn’t budge at all, nor did my combat skills, until I actually used them. So how do I teach above my skill or ability?
Joe spent some time in thought, wondering exactly what he could do before putting it to the side. The teacher job would offer him only a single day to really train the others while he was leveling it himself, unless he was willing to sacrifice his own leveling and future by not being able to change jobs easily after the year was up. His mental stats were more than fine and his other non-combat physical stats were doing well, too, although he was still shy of his endurance by a good forty points and his attack stat was missing twenty percent. He could be willing to let those go, but his resistances, which he’d put significant effort into back on earth, were so weak that Joe was deeply concerned. He wasn’t even at fifty percent on two of them and the third was not even twenty percent. Added on top of that was the systems unwillingness to let him use weapons without specific skills available, and Joe really worried that he would be able to continue meaningfully leveling up when he had only bow and cudgel as weapons available for his use, although not even cudgel as that 'char:' was currently allowing him to use his double learning skill.