Krysta
“Ah, whatever.” Joma waved her hand dismissively. “It’s a reasonable deal. And I agree to those terms for now. But I do reserve the right to refuse taking in Aalam as my apprentice if something changes my mind after meeting him, and that would inherently alter the contract.
“Going back to Aalam, though, you probably know him best, right?”
Ms. Li nodded.
“Then how messed up do you think he’ll be when he wakes up?”
For a second, Ms. Li’s expression showed anger, but it was quickly suppressed. Before she could talk, however, Joma raised her hand. “Your teacher has probably pushed you to talk to me before Aalam wakes up, right?”
Ms. Li nodded, her expression neutral and her seemingly nonexistent aura completely unreadable.
“And I’m guessing she hasn’t explained to you the nature of the benefit Aalam can gain from having personally killed such a powerful B rank, likely telling you the truth by saying it would affect you negatively if you knew.”
Ms. Li nodded again.
“Well that benefit, which is huge, can be greatly helped by having an A rank’s guidance. But I need to understand his emotional state if I’m going to be able to guide him well. And, for this, you’ll just have to trust me.”
Ms. Li looked thoughtful for a few seconds. “Will you first answer a question of mine?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have any conflicts of interest when it comes to making my force more powerful that you think I would want to know about?”
Joma smiled. “Beyond what you’re already aware of, that I will be taking Henrietta Vin as my other apprentice, no.”
“Then can you ask Krysta to leave the room?”
“Very reasonable.” Joma turned to look at Krysta and Krysta rose to her feet. She really wanted to hear more, but Aalam Alvaro’s emotional state really wasn’t any of her business. So, she left the room and went to a nearby large training hall to practice her magic.
* * *
About ten minutes later, however, Ms. Li, back in her blonde disguise, entered the room and smiled at her.
“Would you like to have a bout? This is my first time on an A rank planet and I feel like I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.”
Krysta frowned slightly, but she motioned her agreement and summoned her mana. The room was a couple kilometers wide, and an A rank planet’s suppression was extremely high, so there was more than enough room for combat at their level.
More important, however, the woman in front of her had been fooling her for over a year, so she kind of liked the idea of beating her up a little.
But the fight didn’t go the way Krysta wanted. At the start, Ms. Li created 6 doppelgängers of herself and both she and they entered into stealth, and, while Krysta was able to see through the stealth with her extreme spatial affinity, her senses weren’t strong enough to figure out the real Ms. Li from the 6 fakes.
Even with her high grade Law Pupa of Void Slice, her attack speed and power were suppressed on an A rank world, and the entire time she had to fight against some kind of lust-based charm effect. As a result, along with Ms. Li seemingly using Sensory Domain to predict the path of all her attacks almost instantly, Ms. Li and the doppelgängers were all able to dodge her spatial slices, and the fight continued for a couple minutes.
That is at least until something shifted slightly and Ms. Li began to dodge her attacks even more easily.
Then Ms. Li summoned out that blade which had killed even a B rank and started using it to telekinetically attack. Krysta got so flustered trying to dodge the blade that she allowed one of the 7 copies of Ms. Li to get near her, and apparently it was the real one as the punch it threw directly toward her heart, empowered by some kind of death Law, really hurt.
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“Should we call the bout over?” Ms. Li asked as she dodged back from any retaliatory attack Krysta could make with her so close, desummoned her doppelgängers, and summoned 6 new ones so Krysta could no longer identify which of the seven was real.
“Fine.” Krysta was frustrated, but she realized Ms. Li could have killed her with that attack if it had been with a weapon, as she hadn’t managed to raise her defense in time. And there was no benefit to being petty.
“Are you mad at me?” Ms. Li smiled at her again as she exited from stealth, ceased the charm assault, and desummoned her doppelgängers.
“You lied to me for years.”
“You took a cultivation technique you didn’t need, forcing me to find a way to get it myself, and that cost me nine years of my life.” Ms. Li’s smile had disappeared, replaced by a frown, and she started glaring at Krysta as her aura, which was far more powerful than Krysta’s, spread out and suppressed her. “Do not play the victim in this situation, little rich girl. Diana may have forgiven you, but I’m the one who had to pay the price for your actions.”
Far more than when Diana had threatened her in the War of the Chosen, Krysta felt fear, to the point she almost soiled herself. And she really didn’t like the feeling, but she didn’t know what to do about it as the woman continued glaring at her for nearly ten seconds.
Then, however, as if nothing had happened, Ms. Li started smiling again and her suppressive aura disappeared as she looked over to the side of the training room, where Krysta realized her mother had likely been standing the entire time, hiding her presence. “Is that enough? Anything more and it feels like I might actually sour my relationship with your daughter.”
The Alchemist of the Deep Woods laughed as she tossed an information orb to Ms. Li, who telekinetically caught it and placed it into her spatial storage ring. “Yes. Thank you for your help, Ms. Li. I look forward to working with you again.
“And do consider that job offer. It by no means has to be a full time thing.”
“I will, Madam Alchemist.” Ms. Li bowed toward Joma, smiled at Krysta, and then left the room, presumably heading back to Earth.
“So.” Krysta’s mother turned to look at her. “What do you think of Li Mila?”
“She’s, she’s—” Krysta had no idea how to answer. Even realizing her mother had likely asked the woman to freak her out as some kind of training, it had still worked.
“Yeah.” Krysta’s mother smiled widely. “An E rank I couldn’t read the aura of. That was one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in a while.”
“Did that information orb contain the complete technique of the Twelve Element Primal Code?”
“Yeah.” Her mother reached out and put a hand on Krysta’s shoulder, squeezing slightly and injecting power to forcibly adjust Krysta’s own energy, which had deviated slightly without her noticing, seemingly from that death element empowered punch. “I felt we owed them that much.”
Her mother took her hand back and continued to smile. “Now, I’ll ask you again. What do you think of Li Mila?”
Krysta thought about it for several seconds, feeling herself calming down, but she couldn’t come up with a perfect answer. “I don’t know what to think.”
“Exactly. I can’t get a read on her either.” Joma laughed again. “If I hadn’t heard about her history, I would have thought she was just being straight and honest with me. But with it I have no idea.”
“I lost to her.” Krysta felt her confidence fading, and it didn’t feel good.
“Yeah. And she went easy on you.”
“Easy?” Krysta had noticed Li Mila working on her Laws during the fight, and she had won almost instantly as soon as one of them seemed to advance, so it was probably true. “By how much?”
“A whole, whole lot. Unlike you, she’s already reached the max level for E rank, so her stats are well beyond yours.”
“Whew.” That made Krysta feel better for a second, but then she realized something was wrong. Ms. Li had been slower than her during the fight, so it didn’t make sense her stats were higher.
“Thus she soul shackled herself to the point her stats were about 80% of yours,” Joma continued. “The bigger thing was she actually fought you fairly, without any psychological tricks. She’s primarily a lawyer. Her powers aren’t designed for a straight up fight.”
Krysta took a deep breath, closed her eyes for a second, and then looked back at her mother. “What lessons are you trying to teach me this time?”
Joma’s grin remained and she raised two fingers. “Two. One, you can’t be complacent. Were your combat skills better, that girl would have had to resort to a lot more tricks, so you should practice more, a lot more—especially now that a new overpowered apprentice is coming to take your place as the top E rank under me.” Her mother’s grin then faded and her voice became more serious. “And, two, you need to be more careful in your actions. If Ms. Li was a truly vicious person, you would have made an enemy completely capable of killing you without a trace of her involvement from one act of stupidity by taking that reward from the Trial Tower.
“You’re not going to stop making mistakes, and you shouldn’t become paralyzed in your actions, but try to learn from Henrietta when she arrives and make sure to keep the bigger picture in mind when you act.”
Krysta took a few seconds to absorb what her mother had said, then she looked at the door to the training room. “Will I ever be able to act like that, all smiling and cheerful one second and utterly terrifying the next?”
Her mother also looked at the door. “With enough experience probably, but hopefully never with such natural ease.”
Krysta turned to look at her mom and Joma elaborated. “Look at how we’ve been talking about Ms. Li right now. She hasn’t done anything inherently untrustworthy, yet we’re finding it hard to trust her just because we know she could be faking everything we’ve seen. Wouldn’t it kind of suck to live like that?”
Krysta gave it some thought as they started walking toward the exit, and she had to agree. But then she remembered something. “Wait, but what job were you offering her?”
“Oh.” Joma grinned again. “Those eyes of hers can subtly influence not just lust but greed. I want her to host the Forest Cauldron’s bi-yearly auctions once she reaches D rank.”