Maria gave the [Inferno] Skill book to Lilith, who was immediately elated to receive it from her though she felt a little hesitant.
“A-Are you sure, Maria? I mean, you did all of the work in the boss battle and you also have [Hellfire], right? Is it really okay for me to receive this?” Lilith asked, voicing out her hesitation.
“Haha, don’t worry about it. Unlike your [Hellfire], my [Hellfire]...is a bit different. It’s the modified version that I learned from my magus teacher, Paimon, so it can’t be upgraded,” Maria explained.
She then cast her [Hellfire] and showed Lilith how it was different.
“Look, I can manually adjust the power of my [Hellfire] by pouring more mana into it, which isn’t something you can do, right?”
“W-What??? You can do that???” Lilith asked in shock.
“Yup, and with my vast mana pool, I can probably make it rival [Inferno] or even make it stronger!”
Maria poured more of her Divine Energy into the spell and it grew bigger and bigger until it engulfed the entire room.
“H-Holy shi–”
“Mary, stop! It’s so fricking hot!”
“Oh! Sorry~”
She quickly canceled her spell and the flames dissipated instantly. The once flame-engulfed room returned to its normal state except that everything had now been scorched and turned to ashes.
A lot of the expensive-looking decorations and furniture had been destroyed. Upon realizing this, Maria let out a cry of dismay, “Noooo!”
“You did this to yourself, Mary. Now hurry up and distribute the rest of the loot so we can get going already,” Lizzy said as she patted her friend on the back.
“...Fine…”
Maria gave Sky the [Sword Storm] skill because she could use it and Sky learnt it immediately because she had [Sword Rush] as one of her skills. It was one of the few chasing and escaping skills that warriors had, so the upgraded version was definitely something Sky wanted.
The 7 other items were just weapons and equipment. Barkas mostly dropped knight class related items because he was a Royal Guard Captain. It went without saying that his class was in the knight branch.
Since there were no knight class players in the party, Maria decided that the items would go to the auction unless someone from her friends' group wanted to buy them on the spot.
Emily could definitely make use of those items, but she showed no interest in them because they weren’t as good as the set she currently had equipped.
After asking the other people on her [Friend List], her brother Gerald decided that he wanted to buy the shield that was dropped by the boss. With that, she set aside the shield for her brother while the other 6 items went to the auction.
The party did a sweep of the room and found no hidden areas, so they quickly left with the quest item, the [Castle Garden Magic Tablet], in hand.
The trip back was pretty uneventful, so the girls–except for Maria–were able to continue analyzing the video of their boss battle from earlier. Everyone, especially Lizzy, Rafflesia, and Sky, were eager to learn the attack and movement mechanics that Maria had used on the boss, Barkas, which made him constantly stumble around.
They asked her a few questions, but after Maria’s incomprehensible explanation, they decided to just quietly analyze the video.
It wasn’t like Maria didn’t want to teach them, she was just a bad teacher. Explaining it with words was hard for her because the actions she took were all done through instinct and muscle memory.
She just followed her eyes and knew where to move and which place to strike. Due to that, Maria didn’t know how to explain it well to her friends.
This was the problem with geniuses. They were able to move forward at their own pace, but their pace didn’t match the pace of other ‘regular’ people. Even if her friends did learn Odin’s [Sundering Steel Sword Art], it was highly doubtful that they’d be able to perform the feats that Maria did.
She was able to learn the fundamental martial arts of a game character and implement them in her daily life in the real world and in the game world. She just never thought too much about it because it was all just fun for her.
Now that others wanted to learn from her, she found it quite hard explaining how she did it. Her friends were able to see that, so they didn’t push her for a better explanation.
By the time the party got to the castle’s Main Lobby, the girls were a bit too deep in their analysis that Maria had to call out for them and break their focus so they could move onto the castle’s next area.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
The next area was the castle’s Gardens. Maria and her party swept through the entire area with ease because there weren’t any magical mazes or traps that hindered their progress and, unlike in the previous area they explored, there weren’t any hidden rooms for them to find.
This was a little bit unfortunate because the party wanted to find more loot in the dungeon. The [Dagger Storm] skill book was found in a hidden chest, so the girls were eager to look for more of those chests in hopes of finding rare skill books or equipment for them to use or place at the auction.
This section of the castle felt rather underwhelming, but that was only until they arrived at the garden’s central area and bumped into a magical barrier blocking their path forward.
“Tch, it’s a magic barrier. I don’t think we can just break it with our attacks,” Lizzy said as she looked around to see if there was some kind of mechanism nearby that could turn off the barrier or destroy it. “Split up and search the area! I’m sure there’s some clue around here!”
The party began looking around the area and before long, Lilith and Maria finally noticed something. Lilith was a mage class player, so she had the passive skill, [Mana Sensitivity], which allowed her to feel the traces of disturbed mana in the area.
Maria didn’t have the same skill as Lilith, but she did have the Magus subclass skill, [Magic Mastery], which she learned from Paimon. It was much better than the [Mana Sensitivity] skill, so Maria wasn’t only able to feel it, she was also able to see it.
“Guys, over here! We found something!” Lilith spoke up and asked for everyone to gather.
Maria changed her ax into a scythe and quickly cut down the plants in front of her. The garden’s flora was enchanted and couldn’t be destroyed, but the large bush in front of her was cut down without resistance.
Behind the bush, Lilith and Maria found a pedestal that had some kind of indent on it. The rest of the party soon regrouped with them and they saw the thing as well.
“Good job you two,” Lizzy said as she came up to them and patted their backs. She then took a closer look at the mysterious pedestal and examined the indent on it. “Hmmm, it looks like we need to find some kind of tablet or trinket that’ll fit inside of this…Did anyone pick up anything that looked like this on the way here?”
They had been fighting a lot of lycans on the way here to the Garden’s central area and picked up a lot of items–miscellaneous ones too.
“Oh hey, I think this is what we’re looking for!” Cindy exclaimed as she took out some kind of broken fragment from her inventory.
[Broken Fragment
Type: Miscellaneous
A broken fragment of some kind. It has no apparent use and is completely worthless. Maybe if you gather all of the fragments, it’ll become something useful.]
This miscellaneous item was something the lycans all dropped when they died. The girls haven’t trashed the miscellaneous items that seemed useless yet, because they only picked up the items and planned on sorting everything once they cleared this section of the castle.
Thankfully, they didn’t or else they’d have to go back and scour through the castle gardens to find these Broken Fragments again.
The items didn’t have a quest item description, so there was no doubt that they would’ve been scrapped had Maria and her party members sorted their items on the way instead of postponing it until the section was clear.
“Good thing we haven't sorted our items yet. Otherwise, we would’ve tossed these away!”
“Yeah…how lucky…”
“Quicky, let’s gather them together and see what happens!” Lizzy exclaimed.
The girls gave all their Broken Fragments to her, but unfortunately, nothing happened.
“Eh? Shouldn’t something have happened?”
Maria looked at the fragments for a moment before commenting, “Maybe the enemies in the garden all have these fragments and we need to kill all of them to assemble the item that’ll fit on that pedestal's indentation.”
“Ohhh, that could be true! If I recall correctly, every enemy we encountered on the way here all dropped these Broken Fragments!” Rafflesia stated excitedly.
They didn’t have anything else to go by as this was the only clue they had. Sky quickly spoke up and said, “Let’s go then. We should scour the entire garden and kill any lycan we see. Once we’ve killed all of them, then we’ll see if it’ll work or not!”
“Yes, there’s no use trying to think about it here when we already have such an obvious clue. The lycans here don’t seem too powerful, so let’s split up?” Cindy suggested. “I think we should pair up to cover more ground! I’m going with Maria!”
She quickly dashed over to Maria and locked arms with her. The rest of the party members began pairing up, so there were 3 teams now. Lizzy went with Lilith while Rafflesia paired up with Sky.
Like this, each team had a close-ranged fight and a long-ranged damage dealer. All except for Maria’s pair, as Cindy was the party’s healer, so her damage output was severely limited.
However, there weren’t going to be any problems since she was paired with Maria, the party’s strongest damage dealer, who could use both close-range and long-range attacks.
“These teams are good. Let’s get going then. Remember to pay attention to the party chat and request backup if you need it! The lycans may appear rather weak, but you never know if something powerful suddenly appears.”
Before Lizzy assigned regions for each team to explore, they explored the area for a bit and noticed that they could bypass the central region by going around it. Since they could explore deeper into the gardens, Lizzy decided that Maria should be assigned the areas past the central area.
“Okay, since there are deeper areas to explore, you guys will have the honor of doing that,” Lizzy said, speaking to the other 2 teams. “I think you guys should go all the way to the other end of the Garden and systematically sweep the area while working your way back here to the center.”
Cindy, Maria, Rafflesia, and Sky acknowledged her orders and nodded in agreement. The garden was rather vast and they needed to be meticulous in their search. Since every Lycan held a Broken Fragment piece in their hands, the girls had to make sure that they killed every last one of them so that they could assemble the item they needed.
Since every Lycan in the gardens had to be killed, this meant that another team had to retrace their party's steps and check the areas where they had already passed by to make sure that they didn't leave any stragglers behind. They were making quick progress in exploring the castle gardens, so they might have left some Lycans untouched in the areas they passed.
“Since we'll be exploring the new areas, this means you and Lily will go back and retrace our steps?” Maria asked.
“Yup, we have to be absolutely sure that all of the lycans have died in the areas we’ve already passed through,” Lizzy nodded in affirmation. “Since we’ve already gone through the place once, killing some stragglers shouldn’t take too long. Once we’re done retracing our steps, we’ll go and explore the new areas starting from the central region, and work our way to you guys. After regrouping, we’ll see if we can assemble the Broken Fragments into an item or not.”
“Alright, then I guess we should get to work.”
"Mhm."