“What should we call you?” Ebony asked his new friend.
“Ordina. Na. Guardian Na.” It wasn’t too surprising that the dungeon knew that people called it Ordina but apparently, the Guardian liked to be addressed as a separate entity.
“Are you the same guardian?” He didn’t stop to think if that was a sensitive question, the previous guardian was killed after all.
“Guardian same. Part Ordina. Body different.”
Ning Xin was picking out new information as well. If Na wasn’t lying, dungeon guardians have part of the dungeon’s consciousness or soul if they had one. Unless this was unique to Ordina as a special dungeon which would make more sense of its strong ability to learn.
“We want to fight and kill your prime and chief kobolds, you’re okay with that?” Ning Xin had to ask.
“Okay, why kill?” Guardian Na was still in the process of learning.
“The more pressure and or danger we are in, the more we push our skills.” She answered truthfully but not going into detail.
“Make room. Spawn node. Control.”
“Great idea.” Ebony said.
Na led them to a corner of the dungeon walls where it opened up to a small room not too different in size with the guardian’s room on the last floor.
“How many?”
❅❅❅
“This is big…I just saw that giant flying snake bring the target up.” The rogue blinked as he watched the Cardinal Golem bring the target couple up.
“What, where? I don’t see any Issiles.” The groggy crafter was still a little mad that they had been forced to continue their travel ahead of their target.
“Illusion, but nothing I can’t see through.” Their party’s tracker had confidence in his abilities.
“So we lost them.” The even angier mage of the party was only appeased by the thought of a larger paycheck.
“Who do you think I am? I marked the Xeng’s callstone the moment we first bumped into them.”
“Why not the target?”
“His perception is crazy. I can see why meditators seem ‘slow’ all the time, I wonder how he sees the world. Ell, they’re going fast.”
“Please please please, let’s go slow. It’s not like we have to watch them all day round. We’re just here to check out their strength.” The mage begged, stretching out her words. She would’ve used provocative actions were she to have the bodily assets to but she didn’t so she didn’t shame herself by doing so.
“Fine fine. Based on what we’ve seen so far. Two point eight.” The leader spouted a number.
“Three point three.” Their tracker countered.
“Two point six.” The crafter was only slightly interested in some of the things the target had said about his burstbow.
“Two point seven.” The mage chided in.
“Three point eight.” Their Dwarven friend surprised all of them.
“You sure? That’s a high assessment, this is before the precautionary plus one. What gives?”
“Very sure. We know meditators have huge endurance capabilities, you can feel it too, that enhancement is thick and he can keep it up for too darn long but the troublesome part is probably his ability as a mage. Have you seen any mage so young that can manipulate 3 lifelike sculptures to move as if they were humans?”
“Well, whatever you say. So that averages out at about 3. Plus 1, so 4. Above 3.5 would bring it up from the lowest rung to the mid rung. For now, send the report to ask for 1 mid rung specialist grandmaster, 5 high rung masters. Don’t forget to list down their movement, perception, endurance, ice and possibly fire magic. Oh and add ‘lowest estimate’ at the end.”
It was easy to find someone who can keep up with their target, even they could do so. It was easy to find someone who can stay relatively hidden. It was easy to find someone who could outlast a Journeyman. It was easy to prepare against some elemental magic. But it wasn’t so easy to find one person who could do all of them.
“Sounds about right if we need it to be done swiftly and quietly. The five of us will have to do the separating of the target from the risk.”
“Indeed. A high paying job sure is nice.”
❅❅❅
“I have no clue on shield handling, you might want to free up your hands by manipulating your shield like me.” Ebony said. Ning Xin was busy fighting against two Prime Verglas Kobold.
“No. Strong body. Weak magic. Like big shield!” Na replied.
‘So it has limits.’ Ning Xin overheard.
“A big shield is nice indeed. Did you learn how to use it from seeing others use it?”
“Short people,” Na said.
“Dwarfs,” Na repeated after Ebony a couple of times whenever it learned new words.
“Maybe you should have your creatures corner some parties and learn from how they fight.”
“Do that. Eat less. Learn more.” Na implied that it was already purposely letting people go so that it could observe their abilities more.
It then sulked and said how it was always ‘hungry’ and was barely able to spawn enough creatures to satisfy the people coming in. Although it was draining all the excess vitality, people wore myriad bracelets and it could only drain some mana from the leftovers of the few spells being cast inside it while it gained a lot of stamina it was spread out amongst all its creatures. So it was very happy when Ebony came in because he was single handedly supplying it more mana than any individual. According to Na, his excess vitality tasted ‘sweet’ and gave it energy just below that of killing or ‘eating’ someone.
There was indeed a low death rate after the initial opening of Ordina.
“Spawn under people. Listen talk.” Na didn’t hide much, when they asked, he answered. He even identified himself as male, as if dungeons had the concept of gender. He said that he made a small space under parties tents and spawned a creature to listen in on their conversation to learn the language and copied Ebony’s mana vibration to speak.
Over the next week, Na learned how to speak as he fought both Ebony and Ning Xin. While the bigger part of the day was slowly intensifying training against more and more Prime Verglas Kobolds. Na would fall asleep or perhaps ‘go offline’ for most of the day, regaining its level. It went past Ebony’s Identify range 3 days back so Na was recovering fast.
Today, it stood up in the middle of its sleep and melded into the walls of the hidden room that had dirt ground and not icy temperatures. Courtesy of Ordina to make the environment more habitable for them. It informed them that a group of five was about to enter the guardian room on the last floor and was off to deal with them.
The Kobolds continued to be spawned from time to time but Na didn’t come back till another three days past. As a level 1.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“You were beaten?” He asked.
“Yes. In less than 10 minutes. I was at the same strength as when I fought you but I didn’t strengthen my body with topaz.” Na added.
“It’s a group of 4 humans and a dwarf right?”
Na nodded in reply.
“Enough of that, just rest for now. We’ll spar with you when you’re back at hundred.” Ning Xin wasn’t as held back anymore when it came to Na. She was being a little silly, the dungeon’s strength didn't matter to her, all she needed was that she could get stronger faster with his help.
It was as if the two of them forgot about each other’s presence as a person, she woke up, trained, cooked and ate, kill, train, dinner, train, sleep and repeat. The two of them optimised their conditioning.
She personally had the knowledge of her mother’s conditioning, since Ebony had a better sense of fighting and knowledge about the body she didn’t think it was anything worth hiding either and let him read the training methods her mother passed down.
“Are you sure I can read this?” Ebony asked. The book was as thick as a dictionary, it wasn’t worn out and was taken care of properly. What he was actually thinking was ‘I actually forgot about that memory I regained again…I got to write whatever I remember down or I feel like I’ll forget it again.’ Having difficulty remembering things was very new for him.
Ning Xin’s book was pretty much useless to him as a sword technique guide but the exercises were pretty intense. Most of the exercises on it were physically impossible for them at the moment but that was the higher tiers. It was clear that stabbing at the exact same spot with minimal deviation 30,000 times for each arm everyday was meant for accuracy training with her twin blades. There was even a time limit calculation that she could derive from her effective Agility stat.
Her conditioning training could be summed up as extreme speed, accuracy and ferocity. Footwork training was paired with her Cascade Dual Longsword Mastery, with only evasive measures and little to no defensive measures in the entire book. Her mother took speed to its limits with this.
“How did your mother cope with the constitution problem?”
“...She had a stronger physique from birth, I’m probably the only one born without one in our generation. Although there aren’t many Xeng born in the same generation as us.” Ning Xin didn’t hate her father but if data was to be believed, his physique just wasn’t all that compatible with her mother’s.
“I see. But I doubt a physique can deal with the stress of increasing skill levels. She must have some skill that can weaken the effects or some body strengthening ones.”
“Of course. Her magic body was built to withstand extreme speeds.” Ning Xin explained.
Magic body relates back to mana. More specifically how mana becomes more physical as one evolves.
The physical body could gain resistance to some physical problems like exhaustion, pain, heat, cold, poison and more but it couldn’t become more resistant to some elements, for example earth.
If one was hit with an earth spell, it would just be physical force and no different from getting hit by a metal hammer or blade. Same thing for wind, he could run so fast but he wasn’t getting wind resistance. Neither was he gaining gravity resistance by increasing gravity on himself.
Ning Xin had both earth and wind resistance because of some special device that her family had. It allowed her to temporarily strengthen the ‘magic’ in her body while she took some runic projectiles from sister Jing’s armour dolls. It was very limited in use but still immensely helpful.
It was a bit confusing but most Xengs waited till they were Master before they trained their magic body or made a skill for it. They think that it was only possible after the Master Class evolution when they imbue mana in their body. It didn’t sound any different to body enhancement to him at first and they really thought that magical resistance could only be built up when some form of body enhancement was used but that didn’t make sense either.
Ebony was basically always enhanced but he didn’t have those resistances. It further solidified their theory that they would only gain those resistances after evolving. He wasn’t sure if that meant Reinforced Mana Chassis was not a magic body kind of skill. Ning Xin argued that he just never took enough damage from gravity, wind or any other magical element for his magic body to gain resistance.
Recalling the memory of reading the conditioning book, he shared it with Ning Xin through words.
“My current training is pretty much 80% similar to tier 2 explosive rock body. Since two tiers higher than our current tier is the limit, I can only guess that her untidy scribblings mean having different elements shot at me while I do my physical training and I have to pretend as if nothing is hitting me.” Now that she brought up the magic body, he was assuming this tier 3 conditioning that he remembered out of nowhere was supposed to be training the magic body.
If Ning Xin was right and he just wasn’t hit with strong enough spells for a long duration, he could test it with her wind magic. Fire would give him heat resistance while it should be possible for his physical body to gain resistance to lightning. If he can get wind resistance it would indeed mean he had what could be considered a magic body already.
“I won’t use my enhancement, so can you start blasting me with all of your magic when we train?” Ebony asked sincerely, it wouldn’t really waste her mana since she could take it as training too but as she had way slower regeneration she would have fewer fights against the kobolds with mana available to her.
“...I could accidentally kill you that way.”
“You would definitely make me stronger this way.”
It was actually plenty to convince her this way but to incite or perhaps motivate her he said it would train her control over magic. Other than her Class Fortified fire magic, her other magic shouldn’t be able to kill him off the bat anyway. Not with Reinforced Mana Chassis on full capacity.
For footwork, he remembered the next in his training regime that he never got to on Earth was ‘Treading Flash’ from the drawing in the book; it was evidently inspired by the kappas. Although he remembered the training exercises, it was questionable whether he would be able to evolve Treading Stride any further as a Journeyman. It was technically possible so he wouldn’t give up trying.
This was where he found out something new, the recurring theme of the use of gravity in the daily conditioning. He didn’t manage to remember the seemingly last chapter but he did have an impression of the image on the page he flipped to. The drawing of someone piercing a black dotted tipped spear into the figure that was training.
There was reason to believe that his mother was a gravity mage and he had gotten the affinity for it from her.
There were many things to try out from his new memory outside of fighting dozens of Kobolds everyday. Na had strong capabilities to learn but these Kobolds improved at a much slower pace. Technique wise, the two of them were quickly surpassing whatever the Kobolds could throw at them. Ning Xin, broke down their fighting patterns while his body just accustomed itself to fighting them.
As for the many blanks in the conditioning that he remembered it was because the conditioning was in the middle of being edited. Just like Ning Xin, her fighting style was different from her mother’s and so was Ebony’s. They couldn’t copy the army and let everyone follow the same regime. They had a very big advantage this way but neither of them saw the benefit in a complete copy of an unfitting regime.
They saw to it that they fought both alone and together against the variety of Kobolds.
After two days of fighting together, Ebony got an idea seeing how they needed Na to open up the room to let oxygen in periodically. In a confined space, Ning Xin's fire magic was deadly in more than one way. To a certain extent, he could cope with less oxygen from both his physique and the fact that he takes fewer breaths than a normal person.
“We can make a bomb.”
“A what?”
“An explosive. You’re not very adept at compression but I am. Your fire is extremely hot compared to Mark’s or any other fire mage I have seen so far. You could conjure a ton of fire mana and maintain it in one of my ice orbs while I compress its size to its limits. The expansion of air would be forced in while you keep the fire from going out. I could keep my ice orb from breaking apart, then I could just throw it and let go of my control.”
“Then the large volume of air and fire would burst out? Would it be worth the effort or mana?”
“I have no idea. Maybe not. We’ll have to test it out.”
He started with a yoga ball sized orb but she couldn’t conjure fire mana inside of it like how it was almost impossible to conjure inside someone else’s body. The ice mana was in the way so he had to make an opening for her fire mana to enter. She tried to squeeze as much as she could, which wasn’t as hard as compressing her own mana since fire mana seemed to listen to her wishes more. She was being very controlled about it and stopped at 25 mana worth.
He crushed the ball of ice into the size of a marble almost instantly as if there was no air or resistance from inside and threw it and Na who just woke up. Na caught the tiny ball coming at it with its hand, reacting fast and catching it accurately.
Na opened his fist to see what was thrown at him to see a flash and the ice shard burst in his face. It melted his face off a little together with the quickly melting shards of ice that managed to cut into his body. He didn’t react fast enough to activate his runic body.
Ebony shared a glance with Ning Xin, both thinking ‘that was actually pretty impressive’. Na was only level 60 right now but his durability was off the charts, even without it activating its runic body which Ebony forgot to ask about. It was pretty impressive for a small amount of mana to show off such effects.
‘My ice melted too fast or the broken shards would’ve done more. The heat within increased more than I thought when I compressed it almost instantly. Pressure increased, so does temperature but ice sort of defeats the purpose, it wouldn’t really matter if we do it really fast though.’
“Sorry about that Na, I actually didn’t think it would do that much damage to you.”
“Just a scratch. What was that?”
Ebony explained the physics simply since he didn’t know how the presence of mana would affect it.
“Is there anywhere on the floor without people?” Ning Xin was interested in the limits of explosive power they could reach.
“I don’t even have many Kobolds scouring the place but these few floors never had many people for long.” Na’s speech had improved considerably.
“Then there’s no problem going all out.”