Donny coughed lightly For now let’s just get one of the buildings I think we should raise the difficulty of both of our kept dungeons The weaker to 8 the stronger to Lvl 23 I also want a third dungeon which we can keep at 5 so the NCCs can train somewhere against real monsters especially if the city limits keep expanding Daniel which should we get
After a brief hesitation where he considered pointing out that it was impossible for NCCs to go into the dungeon but it wasn’t a good idea to attract annoyance at this juncture Daniel said Adventurer’s Guild
Clarissa nodded her eyes bright and excited Sighing Regina gestured helplessly Then she went to stand the meeting basically over After all her corps of doctors and nurses needed to be honed into more physically fit individuals A lot of the medicine they would do now was healing and that required that they be near the injured person able to go to the front line Which is why she begrudgingly accepted Mrs Hamilton’s absence If she could figure out efficient ways to train
But to her surprise Glendel raised his voice Wait before you go there’s one more thing
The group turned and looked at him Shrugging he said I know not when it happened but sometime last night Kraig left the medical area He’s disappeared from Donnyton
Randidly dragged himself forward towards the barrel of water that Mrs Hamilton had prepared dipping his head entirely into it and sucking it down like a vacuum He probably had chugged 10% of it before he was satisfied and straightened wiping his mouth
Mrs Hamilton was a devil he thought to himself sparing her a sharp glance and only receiving a sunny smile in return
The spear she had provided for the first exercise had been just as heavy as that godforsaken vest and swiftly caused his arms to burn But he knew that she really would demand he do it again if he paused so he finished her exercise his chest heaving She had only shook her head and said words that made a vein in his forehead throb
Aren’t you a little too weak And the whole point was to stab the spear through the hoop without touching it working on your control well I suppose it’s fine for your first try
So they moved onto the next exercise which required Randidly to move around between those strange spinny wooden pillars hitting the pegs in a certain order at a certain angle
See the pegs were covered with 6 letters spaced equally apart on the peg At most points Randidly was surrounded by 3 or 4 pillars each with 9 pegs 3 for each segment pointing out in different directions So usually 3 pegs per pillar were within reach Which meant he had access to 54 letters that could be touched at any one point
The whole idea was that Mrs Hamilton would say a word and Randidly would spell it out by hitting the letters in the right order Unfortunately there was a lot of letter overlap and uncommon letters were only located on one or two of the pegs in the 20 or so pillars and the 180 or so pegs
It was allowed to press a letter and take a single step moving so he would be close enough to the letter he needed This sometimes pushed his footwork to the limits making him use his imagination to move to where he needed to be with a single step
Another problem was that everything was spinning constantly moved by the wind from his steps or from the touches of his hand So not only did he have to look around and try to memorize where the letters were but he had to keep track of them all while they moved
This was still at the limit of possible Then Mrs Hamilton started giving him words that would have him touch the first 3 letters then freeze because it was impossible to make it across the pillar group to the W on the other side
This is impossible Randidly said flatly
Mrs Hamilton chuckled You just don’t think Why did you pick that first E just because it was in front of you If you had thought about it you would have realized that if you moved that direction the W coming up would be impossible
Randidly just gave her a long glance
He had noticed something different about her since she obtained the Soul Skill But this was insane Truthfully no one had ever really understood how much work Mrs Hamilton did handling all the logistics of the NCCs But it certainly required a mind like a steel trap and an uncommon eye for detail And now with the bonuses provided by her soul skill
Her level of insight and planning was slightly intimidating
Randidly broke off the glance and tried again and again and again It was late afternoon before he finished performing at a level that Mrs Hamilton found barely acceptable
Stretching Randidly removed some food from his spatial ring and took several bites swiftly devouring the food Even though they had much increased stamina Aether only did so much in terms of support people with stats and skills still slowly developed an increasing amount of hunger Randidly consumed close to 40 pounds of food a day Luckily both the Wolverine raising and farming was booming otherwise he wasn’t even sure how much more growth Donnyton could support
After he had sated himself Randidly turned to Mrs Hamilton and asked What’s next
Quiet reflection or spell training I need to think a little about how I want to proceed and check in on Lyra I’ll come back around dinner with your training menu for the next week Good luck
Nonplussed Randidly watched her go then wandered a bit away from the training equipment While he calmly brewed potions he created swarms of pestilence he created Walls of Thorns and waves of Spearing Roots he shot Incendiary Bolts and made Rings of Fire He could still feel the small boost he could give his spells by burning a little bit more mana but Randidly didn’t force it now
Instead he just felt the mana expenditure feeling the small differences in the ways it flowed out of him depending on what spell he used They were currently just vague impressions but Randidly had the feeling that as his sensitivity increased he would grow nearer to having the same strange power as Lyra had able to freely manipulate and control mana
After he had repeated the cycle of spells several times he sat down to meditate activating Agony The vicious digging jarring pain became his world but Randidly was used to it now and his powerful will made it possible to ignore the worst of the pain for now Instead it served as a kind of isolation removing him from the influence of outward stimulus The sound of the wind and the warmth of sun on his skin slowly faded away leaving only his razor sharp focus
With his attention inward Randidly focused on the one area of himself that proved that it was possible to control Aether or at least to direct it that strange place where his Soul Skill rotated inside of himself Even now the strange decadent rotting green energy flew around the core of Aether opposite the bright orange energy burning everything the green energy left behind to ash
When he had caused the Aether to move two details of the situation stuck out to Randidly That he wanted to avoid his Soul Skills collapsing into nothing incredibly badly and that in that moment he had a strong image of Aether forming the core of a rotation balancing the two forces
From his experience with the system both of these were logically important The system responded to your desires With a stronger desire the system would respond more powerfully And your perspective on what the system was changed how it behaved It made sense that a powerful and logically consistent image of an outcome could bring that outcome to be
Since he had used Aether to change his Soul Skill why not experiment in that area again Refining the Soul Skill further He likely couldn’t do it immediately but while he was working on Agony and Meditation it was a good way to keep his mind occupied At the moment he didn’t have any ideas on how to do such a thing but Randidly believed that it was due to the fact that he didn’t have a strong image and wasn’t sure what he wanted
So sitting there the energies rotating within himself Randidly tried to imagine what was going on in this cycle