Chapter 9

"Welcome back," I said as they both started to wake up.

Just like the first time, the twins suffered for near two hours, Lana gaining her second level of Mana Poisoning Resist, Kael his first, which was a great harvest since it was a hard skill to level up normally.

After that they fell asleep, overstrained by the hellish training I was putting them through.

All along I soothed them with healing and support spells, caring for both their body and mind to make sure their recovery was complete, with no sequels left.

At some point however, all I could do was let them rest and, in the meantime, I started expanding the cave again.

The first thing that I added was toilets. The twins hadn't complained so far, and in my case I never created waste, but now that they started to eat and drink again they would soon need a place to dispose of the byproduct of normal biological processes.

It didn't take too long, since it wasn't that big of a room and only needed a fire spell to clean any waste, aside from the standard reinforcement enchantments I was applying to the whole place, of course.

After that, I opened the wall giving on the deeper cavern, and shaped it into a corridor.

I didn't know for how long we would stay here, but we needed a place to rest, and us being unharmed as well as undiscovered so far may have been strange, but it was to our advantage, and I wouldn't waste that opportunity.

On one side I created the shapes of two doors, for later use and, on the other side, I started digging, pushing any rock useless rock in my storage to create more space as needed, and filling back where I didn’t want to have holes in the structure.

I kept working hard until the twins woke up. They were now blinking and looking around, slightly disoriented, Lana stretching like a lazy cat while Kael’s ears were twitching.

“How are you two feeling?”

“...Strangely rested,” Kael answered, frowning while massaging his chest. His voice was shaking a little.

Lana sat beside him and they snuggled for a bit, in need of the recomfort of each other's presence.

“The pain has already left, but…” He added, at a loss for words.

“It’s like being feverous. Afterwards, you remember the pain, the madness inside your head, but you’ve already forgotten most of it because it hurt too much to remember.” Lana said seriously, more formal than usual.

The pain must have been getting to her.

I nodded at her. “I understand,” I said with a weak, ghostly smile on my face, a rare sight.

“We’ve got a lot to talk about, but first, I think you deserve some relaxation. Here, come with me.” I added, waving at them to follow me.

I opened the new door and they followed me, surprised and curious at this new addition that had appeared overnight.

I led them through the corridor, took the opportunity to show them the toilets before I quickly dispelled the idea that this was the surprise, then opened the second door on the left.

Hot, wet air greeted us, the room on the other side of the door an antechamber where we could strip.

“I’ve made a hot bath for us three,” I explained as I quickly made my clothes disappear, reabsorbing them into my flesh. “You can put your clothes there, on the stone shelf,” I added.

I didn’t need it, though, since my clothing was part of my body, but the twins still needed a place to store their own clothes.

A walked toward the next door but stopped and turned around, the twins being silent behind my back.

They were looking at me, or more precisely, actively not looking at me while they both blushed furiously. I frowned and thought for a second, before one of my minds reminded me that modesty and shyness were actual things.

I don’t have any swimwear.

But the bath would be great for them.

We could let them bathe alone?

Yes, but it would be lonely…

Just tell them it’s part of their training.

A mind suddenly said.

Oh?

They’ll end up naked all the time on the battlefield anyway.

Ah.

True enough.

Also, maybe another form would fluster them less.

Right.

I quickly changed myself from the mature, motherly figure I had crafted to a younger version, around the same age as the twins.

“I’m sorry if I bothered you. Is this form better? I don’t have swimwear, sadly.” I explained, and they seemed a lot less troubled already, which surprised me.

“Y-yeah, you surprised us,” Kael said.

“D-don’t worry, that’s better. We were just not expecting it.” Lana added.

“Is being naked such a bother?” I asked them, curious and concerned.

“W-well…”

“We did bath naked together with the other trainee, but never with someone older than us,” Lana explained.

“Well then, let’s start bathing naked like this, and we’ll slowly chase away this pesky shyness of yours afterward.” I said while nodding, surprising the twins.

“What do you mean?” Kael asked.

“You’ll fight many hard battles in the months to come. Your equipment, as resilient as it can be, won’t be able to endure wear and tear forever. Honestly, I stopped counting the number of times I ended up naked on the battlefield. If you freeze each time your genitals or other private part gets exposed in public, you’ll get injured or even killed fast during a fight.”

Of course, high-level gears were quite resilient, and often had options to self-repair if given enough mana, but even those could be blown to smithereens during battle.

“S-so what, we’ll have to train to fight naked?” Kael asked cautiously, and I shrugged.

“We could not do it, if you want, but you’ll end up in that situation anyway, so it’s either training it out of your own willingness or training it by having your stuff broken in combat, taking the hit and then me saving your ass, until you’ve learned to accept that being naked happens and isn't anything special. Compared to that, bathing naked with me is a walk in the park, in particular since I’m your age now, right?” I explained with my higher-pitched, younger voice. It was fun to be a teen again.

Kael and Lana looked at each other, the second shrugging at the first and, just like that, they started getting naked. I guess me being their age, and them being already used to bathe with the other children at the training camp, aided them a lot right now.

Honestly, I felt like this whole charade about shyness was tiresome. Naked, not naked, there was no difference to me, not anymore, but I guess I was the odd one here.

Once all three of us were in our birthday suits, I opened the second door.

The next room was filled to the brim with steaming water. There was basically just a small staircase leading into a whole room of water. I had embedded light crystals in the walls under the water, creating shimmering lights all around as the water slowly moved, giving it kind of a modern, jacuzzi-like vibe. There were places to sit, to lay, and a deeper pond in a corner to stand and just float.

The water was constantly purified by a spell I anchored at the bottom of the room, leeching away at one of my many mana batteries, not unlike all the other spells, wards and enchantments I had placed around the premise. It would have been tiring to feed mana to all of this by myself, and since I was constantly using my passive mana regeneration to fill the battery I had in my inventory, it’s not like it cost me anything anyway.

The twins hesitated to enter the water for a second, but felt compelled once I went right into it and, soon, all three of us were relaxing.

The mana density of the water would have been a bit too much for them just a few hours earlier but, right now, as long as they didn’t drink it, it should be fine.

“Just a warning; this water is rather mana-dense. With your newly leveled Mana Poisoning Resistance, just swimming in it won’t be a problem, but don’t go around drinking it, alright? Not that I think you would do it, since we’re all quite dirty, but better safe than sorry.” I explained quickly, before going back to relaxation.

***

“Now that we’re clean and relaxed, let’s talk business,” I said, all three of us sitting at the table.

We had relaxed for quite some time in the ever-clean water of the bath, even though Lana had been somewhat twitchy at the start, most likely because she had to part with her equipment for the first time since her combat.

It’s not always easy to take away stat-boosting items, since you felt weaker without them, but it was good life hygiene to not always wear them, a bit like phoneless days back on earth.

However, she quickly calmed down, and the three of us were able to enjoy the hot bath.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Afterward I gave both of them clean clothes, and a new set of light armor and items for Kael, before opening this tiny meeting about, well, a lot of things.

“First of all, thanks to your commitment, you both gained a level in Mana Poisoning Resistance and Pain Resistance. You can be proud of yourself, as very few people your age can tell the same. Very few people at all, in fact.” I congratulated them.

“Between your levels and new skills, you should now be able to endure eating the least mana-dense food and water that I have. However, you will still need to upgrade those skills as much as possible, in the event that you fall deeper into the dungeon. The air around here is already full of mana -which is one of the reasons you couldn’t eat anything I fed you, you’re already saturated with mana just by breathing- and it will get worse even one floor deeper, to the point that you’ll get in danger by simply breathing. Still, the kind of training I put you through was quite harsh, pushed by the fact that you couldn't even sate your thirst and hunger. Since it’s not a direct threat to your life anymore, you can either take it slowly, let your body build resistances and ways to process the mana naturally, or we can keep doing training sessions to speed the process up. The second option is a lot more painful, but also safer and, even more importantly, it would be beneficial to your growth. Being able to process and absorb mana means you’ll get more stats faster and be more proficient with the flux of mana inside you and outside.” I explained

“So what will it be: the natural, slow way, or the training, fast and painful way? And do know that I’m not asking you this for no reason, I need to know your answer to plan a training schedule for you two.” I asked.

The question floated in the room for a second or two before the silence was broken.

“We’ll keep going,” Lana said suddenly.

“...Yes,” Kael added, albeit more apprehensively.

I was slightly surprised by this decision, as this was quite something to endure at such a tender age, but I didn’t want to pry and simply nodded. They seemed determined. After all, they had already accepted to become my ‘slaves’ for the sake of power, and Lana had gone through two rounds of torture unphased, while Kael didn’t seem that much unsettled by it.

***

The talk progressed as we spoke of training methods, boundaries and limits, about what they were willing to do, and what they wanted to avoid.

Of course they needed to grow stronger, but I didn’t want to break them by forcing them to do things they couldn’t bear, it would have been counterproductive.

First, though, I asked Kael to bring Azurfall, in its daggers form so that I could Identify it again.

I had been quite curious as to where he had stored it since, unlike Terrenacht, I didn’t see it anywhere, and it turned out that Azurfall would disappear in its owner’s shadow when not in use, a very useful trick for an assassination weapon.

Besides what I had already found about the cursed weapon, we discovered three new things.

First, it had a skill called Blood Bank that would store Blood Points. It was the base of Azurfall’s skillset, as it could store blood sacrificed by the owner to be used later.

It was from that skill that Azurfall could draw blood to make its attack power temporarily stronger.

Second, in its daggers form, Azurfall would store 100% of the damage done as Blood Point, up to the current maximum of the Blood Bank Skill.

This meant that Kael could either use his own blood or the blood of his enemies to empower Azurfall, a far shot from what I initially thought he had to do. He could, for example, use shadow magic to close the gap with an enemy, draw blood with the daggers, then harass it from a distance with the bow, creating a back-and-forth attack pattern. Or he could feed on me, of course.

Third, and final discovery, maybe the biggest of the three, was that Azurfall was a Growing Weapon.

By using the very same Blood Points that powered the attacks of the weapon, Kael could buy new skills through a menu called Red Growth. I couldn’t access it, but he explained to me that he had only access to one option so far, Blood Bank Expansion 1, which hinted at more things to come.

Since Azurfall was full from killing me, I urged him to directly buy the upgrade and, indeed, Blood Bank expanded, and new skills became available now, all costing the maximum points that Blood Bank was able to hold, meaning buffing Blood Bank was, if not the only way, at least the main one to access more skills, by simple virtue of being able to invest more points at once in the weapon.

With all that taken into account, I created their training schedule which, if you didn’t know any better, looked like hell.

The twins were clearly too weak right now, so the first thing to do was to raise both their stats and skills. To do so, each session would start with me teaching them magic and unarmed combat.

Since they both had cursed weapons, that could not be adapted for each situation or may become unavailable at some point -you never know with cursed shit- I chose to teach them unarmed combat. Fist fight, martial arts, boxing, everything that I knew was fair game, even if that wasn’t much, but the objective wasn’t to turn them into masters, it was simply to make them eligible for a pugilist class or an equivalent. I knew I was no teacher, and even less of a melee fighter, but I could do at least that.

What I was, though, was a mage. Magic was very convenient, for a caster or a warrior alike, it helped you stay clean, produce light, find sustenance and traps, scout, protect and buff yourself, craft and build things, all kinds of things that could potentially save your life at one point or another.

Surprisingly, Lana showed a good deal of enthusiasm after the first training session, while Kael struggled at the start, all because of how I was teaching them.

The reason why Lana wasn’t inclined to do magic, you see, was because she wasn’t comfortable with the Runic Alphabet, while Kael was.

That alphabet was necessary to build runic circles while you recited the chant of the spell.

However, I had Chant Revocation and Speed Casting for so long that I didn’t use this method of spellcasting anymore.

Sure, it was a bit more efficient, the control was clearly better and more precise, and more importantly, it was easy to write down and pass around, a big plus since Folks relied on the sharing of knowledge to thrive, one of the things setting us aside from monster, but it wouldn’t cut it at the depth we were.

Instead, I -tried- to teach them Intuitive Magic.

If Runic Magic was like programming, where you asked the mana to precisely do something by using a well-built command, Intuitive Magic was the art to appeal to mana through instinct and emotions.

In a way, skills like Chant Revocation and Speed Casting existed to close the gap between Rune and Intuition. By training those, you started to substitute your commands, like the chant, with your will, learning how to translate those neat little sentences into feelings and directions for the mana to follow without having to actually be that precise, which was the reason why those skills diminished the mana efficiency of the spells you used, by the way.

All that to say that Kael had to take some time adapting, because using his emotions to control magic didn’t feel natural to him, a young scholar who excelled at learning the runic alphabet, while an impulsive hothead like Lana found it much more to her liking that all those dusty manuals about what rune was linked to what concept and whatnot.

In the end, Kael learned faster than Lana, because he was still a lot more talented than her when it came to magic, but at least the girl didn’t struggle or feel down like she did when she learned her runes. They even had fun together.

So with magic training, then unarmed training done, the second phase of training could start.

During this time, the twins started to learn how to use their weapons and their current classes. It was great and all to get powerful items and abilities, but if you were unable to deploy them during combat, it was worthless.

Kael learned how to shoot a bow and use his daggers, how to move stealthily and find his opponent's weaknesses, while Lana learned how to deal with her bulky weapon.

A greatsword like Terrenacht wasn’t wielded like other swords at all. It had a great reach like a spear but was heavier and more difficult to use, made to fight against cavalry or heavily armored opponents, where the leverage the weapon gave you could be used to pierce their defense. The large guard was used both to protect your hand and to block, parry and control your opponent’s weapon, in case of humanoid fighting only, of course, while the base of the blade, near the guard, was blunt, to allow you it's use as a half-blade, if you needed more precise and complex motions.

This training really helped them train technical skills, like Hide, Dagger Mastery and the like, all very useful skills and all needed to upgrade their classes.

By the third phase of the training, when exhaustion started to diminish their ability to learn and focus, they would start the dumb and dirty physical training, the one where you didn't use your brain, just your body.

They had to wait for a while, maybe three or four training cycles, to start that part, since I had to build them a specific training court.

It looked like a terrain to run laps on, with multiple vicious obstacles along the way. Without any buffing equipment, their whole body barely covered by -quite crude- weighting clothes I made myself, they would run and avoid obstacles for as long as they could.

Using spells to keep their stamina and health topped off, they had to run for hours, days maybe, until they couldn’t do it anymore, their body exhausted even though their stamina was fine, too tired and sleepy after being awake for multiple days in a row.

At that point, phase four would start.

They would eat and drink mana-rich food and water or, if they were too tired, I would feed them, until they were at Mana Poisoning(Major), and then I would keep them alive through the painful process of building their Mana Poisoning Resistance.

Once done, the twins asleep, I would train their resistance further. Starting with fire, I would cast a sleep spell on them and they would sleep in pits full of burning stuff. Once again brute-forcing through the experience with healing spells, they would take the full brunt of more and more powerful fire each cycle, which trained their fire resistance, until the fuel I could provide were not powerful enough to train it anymore, at which point we switched to corrosion, with bath of acid from traps or monsters of the dungeon, once again ramping their power as the twins' resistance grew.

Then it was poison, once again from monsters and traps, then frost, from a magic item I found at one point as I was wandering an icy floor of the dungeon.

Thankfully, unlike Mana Poisoning Resistance, I could keep them asleep for the duration of the training, meaning they didn’t have to live through the full brunt of it, even if the pain still seeped into their dreams, and they didn’t get a lot of actual good sleep until we were finished with their resistance training, or at least what I could train of their resistance.

Since I couldn’t produce damage, the level and type of resistance I could train them in was limited by my consumable. For example, since I didn’t have an independent magical item that would produce a field of lighting as I had for Frost, I couldn't train their lighting resistance. Likewise, I hadn’t found a way to train any of their physical resistances, other than having them strike at each other naked and with as much strength buff as possible, to maximize damage and minimize their defense.

They did gain one or two levels of bludgeoning resistance, but it was nothing compared to their level 7 resistance in every element I was able to train them with consumable.

Talking about consumables, at one point during their training, when their Mana Poisoning Resistance hit the fifth level, and their Constitution was finally above fifty, which meant they had five times the stamina of children their age, and were five times as resistant, they started being able to use potions and other consumables.

Through my more than a century of wandering in the dungeon, I had picked quite a few permanent buffs consumable.

Pills to cleanse the body of its impurity, yes, that kind of wuxia shit, elixirs to favor the growth of stats, stones that boosted your elemental affinities, water that made your skin more resistant, mythical creature blood that bestowed some of their special skill onto you, thousand-years-old vegetable full of energy that buff your mana pool, even dark nectars refined from the blood of a thousand virgins, I crammed everything I could into their meal, mindful of each item’s effect and of what each twin needed, of course, but I’m pretty sure that by the end of it I had used a kingdom’s worth of consumable to buff them.

All the while, as the twins trained, I scouted the floor.

Based on our relative position compared to the other floors, which I could see from the pit, at the center of the Antitower, we were definitely on the 137th floor.

However, multiple things bothered me. For starters, last time I was here, this floor was some kind of swamp/nuclear wasteland hybrid with a strange gloomy, green ambiance weighing on you at all times, alongside mutated semi-aquatic level 120 monsters roaming everywhere, horrible things to deal with since they were perfectly adapted to their environment, swimming through mud and water, going underground and climbing trees to ambush you from all side, all the while emitting aura of nuclear decay, trying to drown you at every turn or to lure you into one of the gigantic plant-trap that littered the floor.

And now? Now it was a fucking meadow with level 20 hobgoblins, a clear blue sky and rolling hills.

The second thing that bothered me was loot or, more specifically, finding loot.

From the 101st floor onward, the dungeon simply stopped generating loot, something I found out through experience. Any floor from the 100th and up would create loot, and a lot of it between the 100th and 80th floor, but deeper? None.

No loot, no staircase to go to the next floor, layers that were more slaughterhouses than challenge ground, from the 101st floor onward the dungeon stopped to be a treasure trove and was nearly literally screaming at you to go back from where you came.

Then why, pray tell, was there loot at this floor? And not only that, but also a staircase to go down! I didn’t find any to go up, but still, that was unheard of, and I was most likely the biggest expert about the Antitower that ever existed, Dungeon Master not included.

Basically, I didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t like it.

As my unease grew, I started pushing the twins harder. Day after day, week after week, I could feel that something wasn’t right, a something that was getting closer and closer to us.

We were lucky that this floor was so peaceful, I had time to train the twins, but as time passed, the faux sky seemed to dime, the grass seemed to wither, and the whole floor seemed to slowly change again.

Just in case, I had the twins starting to kill me in turn, with their bare hands to avoid having problems with their weapons’ skill, to try and bolster their level, but they could only kill me once each before it happened, only taking a handful of levels for themselves.

It was just after the twins woke up from another sleep of resistance training. We were finally out of time and, as the sky fell on us, I found myself hoping that Lana and Kael were ready, because we had to flee to the next floor, and the 138th floor was no joke.