They all slept in the suite again, Kim having informed their parents at some point that they were busy at the Hall and wouldn't be home. That was apparently nothing new these days, as Soph and Kim had both been wrapped up in things at various points that kept them from returning home for extended periods. It was a bit of precise timing as well, since Soph's birthday had been two weeks before and Kim's wasn't until mid-October. That put Soph at fourteen, though she was rather mature for fourteen, at least in terms of physical appearance. That was all the result of mana and the influence of leveling so much at such a young age, but she was still a rather immature, spoiled brat. At least, in Beth's opinion.
They were up early, getting ready and heading out the door in record time the next morning. Getting to the kobold area was almost second nature to them, and killing the handful of beasts in the field was over in no time at all. That meant it was back down, down into the cold and dark tunnels, where they fought for hours with the mangy, screaming beasts. Beth was unbothered, but it was clear the underground fighting wasn't doing anything positive for team morale. Not that beggars could be choosers; without revealing her gate power, this was what they were basically stuck with for the nineties and into the low hundreds. Based on the levels last time, and what they were seeing now, this place would be a good grinding spot all the way up to close to one-fifty, if one were to including the other 'side' of the area with the weird portal and enchanted dome.
Kim would take the longest, as she had started as the lowest level (not counting Beth and Blood), which meant Soph would be the next to hit the critical mark. That didn't happen that day, or even the next, but was the morning of their fifth day of grinding when Soph passed the mark. They had just finished off a room a little deep in, at the very start of the maze, where they were killing a handful of the kobolds that were over level one hundred, much easier thanks to the levels that Beth and Blood had racked up in the last week. Soph was at that tipping point and gave a kobold that the others hadn't even touched a third blast to blow part of its face and head apart when it happened.
Beth spun as the room seemed to wobble just a tiny beat to see the tiny terror kneeling. She could feel an additional sensation beyond the thickness in the air the change caused, the hair on the back of her neck, and some of the hair on her head, standing up. It was very much like static electricity but changed, as this was an effect of lightning mana and caused by a shifting of the mana density and composition of the air around them. Beth watched closely, noting Blood standing practically on top of her sister, as Soph's Presence fully manifested.
Of course, it was wings, sprouting from her back. But these weren't just any old wings. Oh no, not for their stuck up little snob. These wings were absolute art, the spines of them made of a carved blue crystal with white veins shot through, veins that Beth realized were channels of lightning mana. The wings were feathered, with each feather made of a golden material that looked like expertly worked mana gold, detailed to a remarkable degree to appear as living flesh, making it a little difficult for Beth to tell if they were metal or not. The wings themselves were large, even considering them against Soph's small body, truly massive, with what had to be a close to eight feet length for each of them. All eight of them.
"Jesus Christ, of course she's a fucking seraphim. And not just that, a lightning seraphim, if that's even a damn thing," Beth muttered under her breath, getting an elbow in the side from Sabs, who had walked over to her when Soph's manifestation had started.
"You know they're real, right?" she asked.
"I'm looking at them right now," Beth muttered back.
"No, seraphim, I mean," Sabs replied with a shake of her head. "Wonder what they'll think of Soph joining their illustrious numbers."
"Hmph, guess she'll have to read up on it," Beth snorted with a quick eyeroll.
"They might not be very happy about it," Sabs said a little leadingly.
"If they've got a problem with it, they can take it up with me," Beth growled. "If someone tries to fuck with you, any of you, I'll fucking crush all their heads into meat paste."
"Down, girl," Sabs laughed with grin, pulling Beth down and giving her a quick kiss. "But, I really appreciate the sentiment."
"You think she'll realize her already pathetic stamina is draining like water through a sieve before she passes out?" Beth asked, glancing at Sabs with a single, perfectly arched eyebrow.
"Beth!" Sabs exclaimed, slapping her arm before turning. "Soph! Stop admiring yourself and turn it off!"
"But Sabs, look! I'm…I'm beautiful!" Soph shouted back, a huge grin on her face. A grin that turned to a grimace when she staggered a little and clutched at her head. Sabs had already been striding towards her and now rushed forward, assisting Blood in catching the small girl as she almost fell.
"Beth! Help!" Sabs snapped at Beth, who just laughed. "Don't laugh! She's in trouble!"
"She's not," Beth said, rolling her eyes again before trudging over. "If she burns it too much, she'll run out of stamina, her Presence will go *pop*, and she'll pass out. She'll wake up with a headache and nothing more."
"But, I want…my wings…" Soph tried to get out something coherent, but didn't manage much more before exactly what Beth had predicted happened. Her Presence disappeared with a loud popping sound, and then the tiny terror passed out cold. Blood lifted the small girl up, easily cradling her in the lupine woman's long arms, gently shifting her into a more comfortable position before giving Soph a gentle kiss on the forehead. The wolf turned and strode out immediately, clearly intending to take the passed-out sorceress back to the Hall, and Beth clapped her hands to get the other two's attention.
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"Alright, now that that dog and pony show is over, let's keep going," she said.
"Shouldn't we check up on Soph?" Kim asked.
"She won't be awake for a good while, and she'll be very cranky when she does wake up. Blood has her well in hand. Now, let's get back to getting you your big, shiny new boost," Beth explained with a quick shake of her head.
"Well, if you say so," Kim replied a bit dubiously, glancing back a few times during their conversation at the doorway Blood had used to leave.
"I do say so, so let's go. Chop, chop," Beth said, shooing the other two forward. Kim still had three levels to go and, if they were lucky, they'd be able to get her those three levels by the end of the next day. They should get her another level, at the least, with that day, which was still just starting, and if they pushed hard through the evening, that would set them up for the last two levels on the next day.
It was a bit frustrating, as Beth couldn't help too much, or else she'd leech a decent bit of experience, even being a good bit lower level. She was just too strong, and she thought back to how Tazeen had explained a while ago that power-leveling people wasn't really a thing. Beth and Blood could join the other girls' group, giving them some safety and a bit of extra assistance here and there, but they were still reliant primarily on the girls doing most of the work themselves.
It made that day, and the next, a long, slow grind. Helping both Sabs and Soph with their Presences did relieve a little of that grind, as Beth did a bit of preliminary work on getting them used to the power. She was sure they would do plenty of training with the Seniors as well, but she gave them some pointers, including having them practice using it for more limited amounts of time, which was actually a hard thing for most people to master. Kim was able to listen in a bit on some of the coaching, still benefiting a bit herself, but she was much more head-down focused on killing endless waves of kobolds.
Her focus and determination really paid off, as they managed to get through the whole thing the next day, just as Beth had hoped. She was coaching Soph in using her power only right when she needed it, a little frustrated as the little scamp kept getting distracted with the beauty of her own power, when they experienced the now-familiar feeling of spiritual weight in the air. Beth turned with a small smile, seeing Kim had stepped away from the corpse of the final kill she needed to hit one hundred, falling to her knees as the power swept through her.
This was the strangest thing Beth had seen yet, in terms of Presences. She looked for the piece of equipment or clothing to appear on her sister, or some item or even new body part to appear attached to her, but what they got instead was rather a surprise. Almost by instinct, Kim reached out her left hand while still kneeling and in the middle of her manifestation, grasping something that appeared planted in the ground next to her. That object was very clearly her Presence's physical form, gripped tightly in her hand as she knelt with eyes closed.
The object, a banner spear, was quite long, probably seven feet or even a bit more, with a big, broad blade for the head, below which was attached the banner, a heavy black cloth that trailed to the side, swaying in some ethereal breeze. Upon the pure black field was emblazoned a golden lion, facing straight-on towards the viewer and standing tall, with a haughty look upon its features. Strangely, though Beth's first assumption would be that the banner would have spacing for marking Kim's rebirths, it appeared that that feature of her Presence was built into the long haft of the weapon.
Kim stood up slowly, picking up the spear out of the ground, noting the clawed end of the spear at the base of the haft, which is what had let the the weapon easily embed in the ground. She spun the weapon experimentally, feeling the natural ease with which she handled the spear, giving it a few flourishes before planting it again. She admired the lion, and the whole object, for a few moments before dismissing it, feeling very tired even though she hadn't had her Presence deployed all that long.
"Alright, let's wrap it up," Beth said with a clap, making sure Kim didn't need help getting out the of the underground.
"What next?" Sabs asked as they started back up the tunnels to the shaft.
"Next, the three of you learn how to use that power. In the meantime, Blood and I are going to go back to disappearing for a few weeks at a time to level quickly and explore," Beth answered.
"You could keep leveling here," Sabs said, a bit hopefully.
"We could," Beth replied with a shrug. "But we have other stuff to do that we've been putting off, so we need to take at least a handful of days to take care of CRA business."
"Well, try not to be out for six weeks straight this time, alright?" Sabs said coolly.
Beth winced a bit, thankful she was leading the group right now, before saying, "Yeah, sorry about that, but we had stuff come up, and we had to get to two hundred. We'll try not to do that again."
"How long does two hundred take?" Kim asked, Beth thankful for the question, even if she might not have been intentionally redirecting.
"It takes…a long time. You'll see as you go, but we've had quite a few advantages that have let us go a little quicker than normal. It will likely take you guys, maybe, four years? Something like that," Beth said.
"Four years?!" Kim cried. "How is that possible?"
"Look, like I said, Blood and I have had a bunch of specific advantages in our favor. Some of those advantages include time we've spent in compressed time," Beth explained, continuing at the several blank looks. "We've spent time in Trials and special spaces where time moved faster inside. So, for Blood and I, we spent a month, two months, even a year fighting and doing various things, but outside only a day or a week passed. Even though I'm technically nineteen, I'm really more like twenty-three at this point. Blood's also technically more like five instead of just about one."
"I…didn't know anything about any of that," Kim said, a thoughtful look on her face as they emerged into the mid-afternoon sunlight. "How hard is that to find? Or do?"
"It's not unheard of," Beth started slowly as they walked back to the Hall. "But, it's not easy to get, either. From what I understand, that stuff usually costs somewhere between quite a few gold coins all the way up to a few platinum coins per session. Sure, you're getting a couple weeks or a month of grinding done in a couple days, but you have to figure out if that time save is worth the crazy money. And, a lot of those places are booked a couple weeks or more in advance, so you also can't just show up to factions that have sites like that and expect to get in right away."
"Then how did you get it?" Soph asked, eyes narrowed a bit.
"We went hard from the start," Beth responded a little gruffly as they came within sight of the Hall. "I was taking risks, stupid risks, even before I got Blood, and we haven't really stopped. But, with those risks came rewards, including access to places with compressed time that let us do months of leveling over the course of days. You also need to be prepared for the higher levels."
"What does that mean?" Kim asked as they entered one of the outer doors of the Hall, Kim's eyes lighting up a bit when Beth pulled out her Silver Emblem to get them in.
"It means the higher levels are tough, and they take forever," Beth replied with a shrug as they made their way to their room. "Blood and I were fighting sixteen-plus hours a day, seven days a week, and we were sometimes fighting for several days without resting at all. And it still took a couple months of doing that just for the last couple levels."
"That sucks," Kim summed up their feelings on the matter quite nicely.
"It does," Beth said as she opened their door. "And this time we have to go beyond two hundred, which is going to suck even more."
"Oh yeah, the max level keeps increasing," Sabs commented.
"That is does," Beth said, physically taking off her armor to be able to work on it after they cleaned up. She continued as they all followed suit, "Twenty more levels every time. Good part is that means twenty more levels of bonus stats, and that much more kept when you rebirth."
The others followed Beth into the bathroom and Soph started drawing the tub. "Hey, no getting in that until you shower."
"Fine," the tiny girl huffed.