As they were walking down the stairs, Kelsey and Alana were able to feel the still ongoing battle between Abby and Gwen. More than that, they were able to see the absolute wasteland they had created around the riverbank. Nearly every tree for several hundred meters around was nothing more than a pile of splitters and leaves. The river itself had been turned into a pond from what must have been an incredibly hard impact.
They are lucky that managing this dimension is so easy…
Turning her thoughts inward, Kelsey started focusing on how she was going to be able to keep everything she'd learned away from Gwen and her friends. Until they get invited to The Wardens, I'll have to keep the 'why' of everything secret. Could be difficult to keep this stuff from Gwen and Abby though, they'll know that Alana and I spoke. If I change my behavior too much, they'll get suspicious. Most of them should be getting True Classes soon... Everyone except Abby I guess. Once that happens, I can get them in the guild officially and we can start working on the plan.
Thinking of the plan, Kelsey still needed to decide what hers was. She was finding it difficult to decide what to prioritize. Her main priority was, of course, the Mageblood ritual itself. She wanted to get it spread around to everyone she knew and start doing some tests with it. The only information she had to go on was her own experiences, but if her theory was correct, then all of her friends should suddenly start gaining True Classes when they advance.
After dealing with the ritual stuff, she needed to decide between working on the dungeon, or going to see Saint for some training. Ideally, she could do both. She could start on the dungeon and then have Thadius and her party finish it while she was away. Or maybe use some sort of outside contractors for building the dungeon.
This was all assuming that their trip to Saldeya wasn't met with too many surprises. In a perfect world, they should get to Saldeya and be able to move the entire guild out the same day.
Pulling herself out of her thoughts, Kelsey refocused on the world around her. Alana and herself were getting closer to the riverbank and she still hadn't spent any time working on Mythril creation, which was something she was incredibly excited to do.
As they arrived on the ground, Gwen and Abby were still off in the distance fighting. Alana walked off towards the woods, no doubt to do some experimenting with her new body.
With nothing holding her back, Kelsey sat on the ground, Mythril rapier in one hand, her other palm facing upwards.
Intently, Kelsey focused on the Mythril in her hand and activated her Greater Creation of the Magus skill and focused on creating a saber version of the rapier. The moment she did so, she felt an astronomical amount of mana rush out of her and begin to form the saber's curved blade. It was hundreds of times more mana than she expected the creation to use.
As the mana left her body, Kelsey’s mind exploded in white-hot pain. She quickly deactivated her skill, groaning in agony as she slumped down to the ground clutching her head. She could feel blood leaking from her nose and ears as the mana usage ravaged her body.
Gwen was by her side moments later, seemingly appearing from nowhere. “Kel, are you alright? What happened?”
Kelsey coughed, a small amount of blood dribbling from her lips. She quickly spit the blood on the ground out and answered Gwen, groaning in pain in the process. “I’m fine… Tried to create... Some Mythril… Too much mana...Backlash... We... Need to.... Leave. Please… The pain... won't stop…”
All three of the women, who had apparently noticed the commotion and arrived next to Kelsey, quickly nodded their heads, so Kelsey opened a portal and rolled out of the dimension, the pain in her head disappearing the moment she did so. “Oh, thank god.” Kelsey said as the pressure released, and her body healed itself.
Gasping for breath, Kelsey rolled onto her hands and knees. Why the hell was my regeneration not working? She inspected herself in her domain, looking for any signs of damage. Thankfully, a quick glance didn't show anything.
Alright, I need to be extra careful about using mana inside my Dimension. I'm pretty certain that could have killed me...
She had known that mana usage could cause her headaches, but she had no idea that mana usage could cause her physical damage, much less physical damage that couldn't be healed by her regeneration. She also had no idea if other people releasing mana inside her dimension could cause the same issue. It was a troubling thought. It may be slightly riskier than she thought to let people inside her dimension without proper consideration.
The other three women had left the portal and were looking at Kelsey with concern. Kelsey just smiled. “I’m okay now, the pain goes away the moment I leave.” she said, standing up confidently. She was certainly scared, but didn't see a reason to make her friends worry too.
Controlling her fear, she looked around and noticed that the Queen’s guards were all standing around the portal, watching them suspiciously.
Now that she was back in the real world, she was feeling incredibly exposed after everything she'd learned from Alana. She likely wasn't any safer in a remote forest when some demigod was her threat, but she would certainly feel better than being surrounded by thousands of unknown people the whole time.
I've got to get out of this city...
“Hey Alana. Want to take a quick trip to the Mageblood forest? We can do some real testing there. I can bring your guards too.” Kelsey said, gesturing to the guards standing in the small room. “Abby, you should come too, I have some stuff to teach you.”
Abby answered Kelsey by nodding towards her with a smile.
The Queen quickly nodded formally. “Yes, that would be excellent. Thank you, Ms. Kain.”
The leader of the guard, Garrett, immediately called for the other guards to fall in more closely in preparation for the teleport. That guy sure changed his tune… didn’t even argue or say it was a bad idea.
Once she did, Kelsey wrapped everyone up in mana and activated Warp. Just like the first time she had used her Warp with a large group, the bubble briefly tried to unravel, but Kelsey was able to maintain it without much trouble.
A few minutes later, her skill activated, and the group appeared on the riverbank underneath her cabin. It was basically the same spot they had been at inside her dimension. “Welcome to my home... Kinda.” Kelsey said as the group took in their surroundings.
“Wow Kel, this place is beautiful in the real world. I can’t wait to live here.” Gwen said excitedly. “So much more alive than inside your dimension.”
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Kelsey smiled, remembering that she had the same thought just a few days prior.
The guards instantly began moving to survey the surrounding area, trying to ensure there weren’t any threats. Kelsey quickly checked her domain and found Bud lying down in her office. “Hey everyone. I have a pet Thorn Wolf in my cabin.” she said as she pointed up the mountain to the large wooden building. “If he comes down, don’t attack him please. He’s friendly.”
Garrett stopped in his tracks and stared at Kelsey. “You have a pet monster?” he said with disbelief.
“Well, yeah… he’s nice though, I promise. You can meet him if you want. He’s pretty smart too.” Kelsey answered cheerfully.
“I would love that! I’ve heard of friendly intelligent monsters before, but I’ve never actually met one.” he said excitedly. His former angry and distrusting demeanor had seemingly vanished. Why is he so much calmer now? We were only gone a few seconds from his perspective. Whatever, works for me.
“Head up to the cabin whenever, we’re going to be busy for at least a couple hours.” Kelsey said as she motioned for Gwen, Abby, and Alana to follow her.
Kelsey had been wanting to create a small training area out here for a while, so she quickly activated her skills, clearing a large 100-meter area with a large, bladed ring of telekinetic energy. She then made a raised platform out of stone that covered the entire area, with a curved set of stairs leading to the top of the platform. She then moved all of the debris with manipulation, letting it be used as fertilizer for the surrounding area.
The entire process only took her about thirty seconds to complete, and once she was done, she turned around and spoke to the women following her. “Alright. This is where we’ll practice. Gwen, can you work with Alana for a few minutes, get her used to her new body. As always, no magic other than body enhancements. She may take some additional time to adjust.”
Gwen smiled and nodded. “It would be my pleasure!” she said as she created her two short swords. I really need to get her spatial ring so she doesn’t need to create weapons every single time.
“Abby, I want you to just start practicing mana control. Focus on how much mana your skills are costing. I'll come back in a few minutes once you've played around with it for a bit.” Kelsey said as she started to walk away. “I need to try my hand at some Mythril creation.”
Abby smiled and nodded excitedly.
As Kelsey walked away, she checked her domain. The ex-assassin and the Queen were already sparring. Unfortunately for Gwen, she didn’t stand a chance against the level 382 Mage with a True Class. When Queen moved, it was almost as if she vanished, even with Kelsey’s higher mental speed. It wasn't quite the same as when she first met Theo, but it was still quite extreme.
Abby on the other hand had a look of pure confusion on her face as she was using her plant manipulation skill. Kelsey saw realization suddenly dawn on her face as she frantically started testing all of her skills one after another.
Kelsey grinned. Looks like she figured it out.
Kelsey also saw Garrett walking up the stairs towards her cabin, clearly intending to go meet Bud. I’ll keep an eye on him, make sure nothing happens between those two. No idea how Bud will react to a visitor if I'm not there.
Seeing everything was going according to plan, Kelsey sat down and got to work creating a Mythril saber. First, she summoned the Mythril rapier she received from Alana into her right hand. She then opened her left palm and willed her skill to make a small Mythril coin. It worked instantly, but the process of creating the material took an astronomical amount of mana for such a small object.
To create gold or steel in a coin form, it took Kelsey around 0.5 mana. A truly trivial amount. Creating the same sized coin from Mythril took 1,500 mana. She did some quick math and realized that creating a single spear in the same shape and size that she made steel spears from, would cost her over 400,000 mana if she made it with Mythril. Mythril spears would also have the added downside of being lighter, which when talking about a projectile wasn't necessarily a good thing.
Her lances were an entirely different story. She usually used around 2,000 mana in a single lance. Doing that with Mythril would mean taking a full minute to create a single projectile.
Okay, maybe not an in-combat material quite yet. Damn. At least I’ll be able to make some sweet armor and weapons out of the stuff.
So, she got to work. Starting with her saber, she ran into significantly more issues than she expected. Thankfully, she had gotten good enough with her creation skill that creating the first prototype of her weapon was completely trivial. All she had to do was focus on the recently created metal coin in one hand, then will the skill to copy it. This worked, and sitting in her hand was an incredibly light and flexible saber that was completely useless to her.
It was too light and too flexible. Flex was good for a sword, perhaps mandatory, but the metal was so flexible that simply holding it to the side caused the entire blade to flex multiple degrees downwards.
Willing the saber to unravel, she tried again, focusing on increasing the density. She would need to deal with the weight issue first. She was extremely comfortable with her current saber's weight and figured it was decidedly against her best interest to try changing now. Changing the density of a created material was something that came with practice and thankfully she'd had quite a lot of practice working with steel density. The two metals weren't perfectly comparable, but it was close enough that within half an hour and a few dozen failed attempts Kelsey was feeling satisfied with the weight of her new weapon.
Simply changing the density had improved the metal's flexibility issue quite a lot, but Kelsey still felt that the blade was too wobbly for her liking, so she placed her newly created weapon to the side as a starting point and got to work.
Over an hour later Kelsey finally settled on a method for fixing the flexibility issue.
The saber was a single edged weapon, which meant that the back of the weapon didn't have an edge. She used that fact to create a density gradient in the blade, with the densest area of the blade being the edge and the least dense section being the spine, or back of the blade. This allowed the edge to be very rigid and strong, but still let the blade flex when it needed to.
She was no blacksmith, and she was sure that her discoveries were by no means world changing, but she felt satisfied at having solved the problem herself. If this can't be called blacksmithing... What do people call making stuff from magic? Mana... Smithing? A Manasmith? Aren't blacksmiths called blacksmiths because of the soot? Bluesmithing? A Bluesmith? Doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Ah, whatever.
Now, sitting in her hands was a seemingly normal rapier with a slightly shinier than normal steel blade. The hilt design was identical to the rapier that Alana had given her with the only change being in the handle itself. The rapier Alana had given her had a light grey leather wrapping around the hilt. Kelsey had made the decision to go with a black dyed leather, mostly just because she thought it looked better. Who likes light grey anyways?
By the end of her saber’s creation, her head was already starting to hurt, but she carried on and started working on Mythril plated leather armor. Creating the armor plates was a much, much simpler task. She didn’t even bother increasing the density on plates, instead choosing to simply make her armor slightly more protective without harming maneuverability or weight more than was absolutely necessary. She decided to attach the plates only on areas away from joints, like her chest, back, thighs, calves, shoulders, and forearms. It wasn’t much additional protection, but any amount would help.
This process took another hour and another few million mana, but by the end of it, she was feeling very pleased with herself. She would have to make a few replicas of the armor and saber for when they were inevitably damaged, but she thought they turned out well.
Out of curiosity, she identified her new creations.
[Mythril Saber - Immortal]
A blade made of dense Mythril.
Can be infused with mana to repair.
[Mythril Plated Leather Armor - Immortal]
A set of armor made from leather and Mythril plates.
Can be infused with mana to repair.
Oh, wow. I had no idea I could still repair these items with mana… I have always just been making new ones. I really should identify the things I create more often. Oh well, making new stuff is great practice anyway.
Feeling satisfied with herself, Kelsey began walking back towards the Mageblood body recipients, ready to share everything she knew about their new bodies.