"I think next is some more leveling, then we do these two gold-level missions," Beth said.

  "You're fine with going back in after a couple hour break?" Sera asked, jumping into Beth's lap and snuggling up to her.

  "If you need a break, we can certainly take a break," Beth said, making a face as she saw Blood nodding vigorously over Sera's shoulder.

  "No, no, I'm fine," Sera said. "Believe me, I'll let you know when it's time to take a break."

  "Let me set the gate to a much higher starting level and then we'll get going," Beth said.

  She did just that, setting the gate to level two-forty to start, the terrain to grassland, and the enemies to hobgoblins, just to mess with Sera a bit. They weren't going for intense training or unique experiences or developing deep understanding of a foe, they were simply trying to maximize leveling experience in minimal time. The arch created from her settings had an orange and mud color that wasn't particularly pleasant to look at, much like hobgoblin beasts themselves, though it did still have the silver and black portal effect that she was used to.

  Another seventy days passed in a flash, Beth glad that the CRA Hall wasn't like a hotel, with nobody checking on them or asking them any questions. The Association was rather used to strange people with strange habits and strange powers doing strange things. A small group of young women disappearing into their room for a few days was nothing to raise even a single eyebrow. Beth thought about how it was nice to have a place that didn't ask unnecessary questions to call home as they emerged after seven objective days back into the suite.

  "Now, can we rest?" Sera asked, moving to slump on the couch as her gear, and the gate, both disappeared.

  "Yes, we can rest," Beth said as she intercepted the dragon and picked her up. "Don't flop your sweaty, bloody ass on the couch."

  "Sorry," Sera grumbled as Beth carried her into the bathroom, trailed by Blood.

  When they were clean and refreshed, they then slumped on the couch together, Beth checking the updated time on her communicator to see it was early night. She let them all relax for a little bit, but roused them after about an hour to take care of some housekeeping. She was one of the biggest problems of the whole group, having to empty a huge amount of trash from her necklace into the recycling chute in the kitchen. They also all had enough laundry to do that each of them needed more than one load just for their own stuff, so there wasn't any machine sharing that could happen there either.

  When they had spent some time getting their storages presentable and getting their gear cleaned and prepped, Beth took the other two to bed, curling up with Blood while Sera flopped over top of them. The dragon was out like a light, not that Blood was any slower, Beth drifting off to a cacophony of snores and rumbling grunts. She was the first to wake the next morning, the same rumbling and snorting noises echoing throughout the bedroom. It didn't matter in her gate, but boy was she glad they had sound-dampening enchantments on their camping equipment. The noise just these two made was enough to wake the dead, and she really didn't fancy having to fight a group of undead in the middle of the night because her companions snored like an old sawmill.

  First order of business, after getting the sleeping dragon woken up, was food, followed closely by cleaning up and getting ready for the day. Next was deciding what that day was, but Beth was overruled on that, seeing some of the negatives of their increased group size. The vote was two-to-one for taking the day off, mainly sitting on the couch and watching TV. Beth wasn't going to waste the day, however, settling into Sera's lap before bringing up a primer on skill merges. It was something she had done once before, but that was strictly by chance, and she didn't think that was a good method to rely on going forward.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how desirable the skill and how common the skills it merged from were, Elemental Resistance itself was used as a prime example of a skill merge. The requirements, unlike many other merges and combinations, were quite well understood. It was the first time Beth was glad her skills hadn't been progressing quite as fast in a category, as the easiest way to do the merge was to get all the pre-requisite skills to the peak of Silver and then take a special set of pills before pushing the skills into Gold. It was a rather time-consuming process, depending on how long it took to level all the skills, and it involved a lot of getting beaten up by various elements, alongside a lot of pain, but it was worth it. The combination skill had the same coverage as all the various independent skills, but only showed up as one skill on the stat screen and was technically easier to level, as resisting any relevant damage counted towards leveling the skill.

  If she couldn't follow the steps to the letter and she got in a situation where one resistance hit Gold before the rest, the next way to do the merge was to get all skills required to Gold and then take a whole armload of medicines and undergo a special, and expensive, ritual. It wasn't quite as difficult, and the only time-consuming piece was pushing each skill to Gold[0] individually, but it was far more expensive. The medicines and ritual for the Gold-level merge were not at all cheap, particularly in comparison to the ones used for the Silver merge, so best to try not to get something to Gold for now.

  Reading and digesting the primer didn't take all that long, and she was done even before they decided it was time for lunch, throwing some clothes on to head up to the cafeteria. Sera was true to her word, not really surprising to Beth, as she walked around in her half-jacket that somehow always hid her nipples despite the lack of undershirt or bra, and a high-waisted thong that really left very, very little to the imagination. The tall dragon girl got a ton of looks in that getup, but few if any of them were disapproving. In fact, they were quite often beyond even appreciative to the point of slack-jawed awe, a reaction that both amused Beth and one she could empathize with. Even now, she still felt that way a little just by glancing at the dragon, and she didn't know that that would truly ever change.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  This meal was a great way for Beth to gauge Sera's skill, as well, as they hadn't really had a chance to have her use it yet. They didn't have much in the suite, and they had been using rations in the gate, so they hadn't had a time until this meal where they had a bunch of excess food. Watching now, she knew their food budget was definitely ballooning, as she and Sera had already been heavy eaters, but now that went to a crazy degree.

  Beth wasn't even sure Sera was chewing, maybe an effect of the skills, as she dumped plates and bowls of food directly down her throat. The used dishes stacked up on the table like something out of a movie or, more accurately, a cartoon, with Sera eating almost four times as much as she normally did. The dragon also took about as much time as the others, though that was primarily from Beth and Blood spending a little time watching her in fascinated surprise. They took their armloads of dishes over to the return before heading back up to their room, still strange to Beth to not be heading into the underworks.

  As soon as they were back in the suite, door secured and what little clothing they wore now shucked, they flopped on the couch together again. The moment Beth was in Sera's lap, the dragon girl leaned back and belched loud enough to rattle the window panes and shake the couch, a big plume of smoke billowing into the ceiling. She shifted her weight a bit and readjusted Beth in her lap, but that seemed to help minimally, as she let out another burp right after that nearly rivaled the first.

  "Sorry, sorry. I told you this would happen," Sera said with a sigh that turned into a small burp.

  "It really doesn't matter," Beth said with a shake of her head, settling against the much taller woman and snuggling into a comfortable position.

  Sera continued letting loose for a little, though less frequent as the afternoon wore on, and Beth simply tuned it out as she returned to research. The first thing she looked up was the current prices and availability of the sets of medicines for the skill combination, which were a bit eye-watering. After that, she tracked down what the current prices on skill crystals were, including what it would cost to just get Elemental Resistance or something even better that acted like it. That turned out to have two problems, the first being price, which was insane, and the second being availability, as a lot of what she found was estimated price since basically nowhere had even one-time-use crystals currently in stock. It looked like she and Blood would just need to do some resistance training, which would be both time consuming and tedious, but they could mix it in with their other training over the coming months.

  That research only took a few minutes, and afterwards she turned her attention back to what she had been spending quite a lot of time on; Mana Physiques. She was researching various methods of integrating mana into flesh, grabbing a lot of different texts from various places and schools of thought. The main thing she was looking into was how people bound the mana into their physical being, and it was a head-swimming list of ways to link mana into cells and tissue. There was everything from basic frameworks that would bind mana movements into organs and muscles to ways to precisely link every cell in the body into a complex mana structure that boggled her mind. The former was just simply far worse, and Beth doubted anyone ever made anything more than a Copper-level Mana Physique, while the latter was mind-numbingly complex.

  Complexity wasn't necessarily bad, though, and she was studying how people built a network linking together every single cell in their body using their mana. A Mana Physique, at its most fundamental, was the link between the metaphysical, mana, and the physical, body. Creating a Mana Physique wouldn't obviate the need for a mana reservoir, but it would seed every part of the body with mana, requiring less mana from the reservoir to use skills and cast spells. It also reinforced the flesh, strengthening it and making it naturally regenerate faster, though it took a bit more mana from an external skill to heal.

  "Mana…is a particle," Beth muttered out loud, getting a strange look from Blood and a grunt of acknowledgement from Sera.

  "That's right. What are you looking at?" Sera asked.

  "Stuff about mana and, more specifically, Mana Physiques," Beth said.

  "We've got a long way to go before that," Sera said with a small shake of her head.

  "We met somebody that has one already," Beth explained. "Part of that group we pulled together with the phoenix."

  "Oh, the one you were calling the other day?" Sera asked.

  "Yeah. It wasn't the phoenix, but that group," Beth answered.

  "So, someone in that group already had their Mana Physique?" Sera asked.

  "Yeah, Andrea, the girl I called, said that the guy with his Mana Physique, Adam, is an idiot savant. I don't know that that's entirely true; she was giving him a hard time, but he did build a proper Mana Physique before even his fifth rebirth, so there's that," Beth explained.

  "Well, I'm not at all going to tell you what to do, but most people would consider spending so much time on this now a waste. Not everyone, but a lot of people wait until later to think of this," Sera said.

  "But that itself is a waste, isn't it? A Mana Physique is so strong, and the various grades are each way stronger than the previous. Why wouldn't you try to study it early and even make it early? Or make a better one?" Beth asked, eyebrows scrunched up.

  "It's too much to think about for most people," Sera said. "I'm not trying to excuse it; remember, most people can't ever even build one. Of course, people aren't studying it or studying it early on, and then it bites them in the ass later."

  "Makes sense," Beth said with a slight frown. "I mean, it doesn't make sense to ignore it, even if a person is occupied with all kinds of other shit, but it makes sense that people aren't thinking long term and then get to the point where they need that long-term thinking and fall on their face. That's how it always is though, so I shouldn't be surprised by that kinda dumb thinking."

  "I would say it's too much to concentrate on, but I don't think that's a problem for you," Sera said. "Most people would take any opportunity they can to rest, but considering how you fight for a hundred and forty days straight and aren't bothered by it, I don't think the extra time researching is going to affect you much."

  "Thanks…I think," Beth said, giggling as Sera started kissing her warmly all over.

  "Is my kissing too distracting?" Sera asked after a few moments.

  "No! Never!" Beth returned hotly, kissing Sera firmly on the mouth.

  "Just tell me if it's too much," Sera murmured, resuming her gentle kisses.

  Beth leaned into them while resuming her reading, trying to wrap her head around the basic fundamentals of mana. If she didn't understand the basics of mana, she couldn't possibly hope to weld mana into her physical body to create something more than her normal flesh. Mana, at its most basic, acted as a type of particle, though with a few different operating principles than atoms and molecules. Understanding those differences was critical to incorporating mana into…well, anything, really. The greater the understanding of basic principles of mana, the stronger a person would be with everything. That understanding didn't always immediately translate into new strength, but working on skill and spellcasting with a greater understanding of mana could lead to massive improvements.

  Beth's reading took the rest of the day, and she glanced over at one point to see Blood snuggled up against Sera. The dragon girl had an arm around the wolf and her other arm around Beth, with one of her massive hands entirely covering Beth's stomach. Beth made a blanket appear from her necklace, taking it off the bed she had in storage, having it appear over top of them and fall on the three. Sera didn't bother to let them go, so it fell to Beth to rearrange the blanket so they were comfortable. They fell asleep an hour later like that, or at least, Beth did, Blood having been asleep, or feigning it, for quite some time and Sera already snoring.