Rachel woke up to the dim blue glow of a light stone and she looked at it annoyed before she remembered what she tried to do and actually did the night before.
“ What the hell got into me. Of course, he wouldn’t sleep with your pansy rear. He just wanted to be your friend.”
After she says that the room starts brightening up and she finds herself not in the charmed victim dorm, but in one of the private rooms. Jeff’s private room. Who was sitting in a chair with his back to her tapping the light control for the room.
“ To be fair, I probably would have if you did not rush things. Then we got emotional and depressed. Why can’t being friends be easier.”
Rachel blushed as she covered herself the best she could with her arms and legs. Which was pointless because he was still not seeing her. It took her a moment to realize she could use the beds blanket to cover up then spotted her dress and felt embarrassed even further picking it. He didn’t say anything as she put her dress and shoes back on and then sat on the bed ashamed.
“ You’re right again. Being friends is difficult, especially when I want to be more than that. And I am sorry for making you uncomfortable last night. I... I don’t know what came over me last night.”
“ A lot of things, I imagine. Feeling better?”
Jeff leaned over the chair edge to look at Rachel and saw her beam a smile at him like he remembered she had when they first met.
“ Yea... and sorry... for crying like a girl. I shouldn’t have forced you to bear my burdens.”
He smiled in return and stood to move over to her and offer her a hand.
“ So... do you want to make this a hang-out day or...”
“ Oh god, yes. I am so damn tired of hanging around a bunch of whiny women who can’t get their act together. We have a damn Damocles sword hanging over our heads as we all know it...”
Rachel pauses seeing Jeff utterly shocked by her sudden attitude change.
“ Too much?”
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“ Just a bit. So, what do you want to do today?”
Rachael thought about it a moment before smiling again.
“ What were you going to do today?”
In response, Jeff goes to his desk and pulls the top paper off a stack. She takes it and blanches at seeing the overly detailed list.
“ Seriously, I've seen athletes with less detailed schedules. You do this every day?”
Jeff gestured to the stack of papers he took the one he showed her.
“ My rough schedule for the next month.”
With his permission, she started looking through his schedule and became surprised at all the classes and lessons in his plans. It appeared he had enough lessons to learn how to be an aristocrat alone that would be required for a native of the world to learn in a year. That is when she realized how serious he was being with his plans. He truly plans to cut a piece of this world for himself. Which begged the question of what she wanted to do and how she was going to do it.
“ I mean these are all very detailed. Are you sure you can take the day off?”
Jeff nods toward her and reaches for the blank papers and a pencil.
“ I just got to give the tutors a notice of absence. For the physical training, I am supposed to take a day off each week anyway. Since I have not done so this week, I can do that without notice. I will write a note to the trainers anyway as a courtesy. After that, I am free all day.”
Rachel nodded as she watched him write. She never realized he had a flair to it either. At the end of each note, he pressed a stamp on the bottom that was a hexagram with six different colored points.
“ Like it? It came with my hereditary package. It is a magical stamp that does not need ink. It cost ten gold talons but it is worth it.”
Rachael blinks as she takes the newly finished note. Instead of saying to one of his tutors he was taking the day off, it was instead written in a manner of someone giving instructions to write out several messages with the same content to several people. She then hands it back and he gestures it to one of his maid constructs.
“ Take this to the filing office.”
The construct takes the note and solutes before leaving.
“ How come your construct solutes you?”
Jeff turns to look at his boss in thought.
“ If I had to guess, it is because all my cards follow the soldier’s path.”
“ Path? What’s that?”
Jeff moves over to his dress uniform and pulls out a notebook from an inside pocket.
“ It is a defining theme for my cards as far as I can figure. Since I have been focusing so heavily on fighting and well, leading an army. All my evolutions have all been about that.”
Jeff turned to one of the middle pages of the notebook and offered it to her. To her surprise, it contained all kinds of insights and theories Jeff had made about his own class. Things she never even considered about her own class. For example, the makeup of magic in his cards can be deliberately altered slightly by injecting extra mana into the card in its formation. This forcefully alters the card by adding two positive and a negative trait to the card. Like being able to have extra mana capacity and slightly physically better in return for a reduced recovery rate.
This caused her to instinctively try to push some mana into her own passive healing.
Your skill [Healing aura] has been enhanced to have the option to increase the healing effect by 50% at the cost of 250% drain.
Instantly she started to feel the drain on her mana so she cut the extra supply. All Jeff did was raise an eyebrow as he watched her.
“ Wow, I did not even know you could overload your spells.”
Rachel then turned the page to find out more about the theories Jeff has for evolving his cards.