Part 2 Of Arc 1 Start

“WOOOO!” Mia shouts as she flies past the charging rat queen, raking one of her swords across its side. The thick fur opens up to reveal a shallow cut as the oversized thing screeches in pain. I fire a few mana bolts at it while it’s distracted as Ivy keeps up a steady barrage of thorns to whittle down its health.

It resumes its previous charge and I send two waves of frost magic towards it to slow it down, dodging to the side and striking with my axe into the cut that Mia opened up, the weapon biting deep into its flesh and worsening the wound. I wrench the axe free and roll to the side as a swipe of its paw whistles through the air where I was standing a second before.

It follows it up by stumbling towards me and I turn to face it, just as Mia comes up behind it and lands on its back. She thrusts each of her swords into the beast’s head, and it roars in agony. I take the chance and with a yell, embed my axe in its head, near one of its eye sockets. The queen gives one last whimper before going limp and dissolving into dust.

2000xp

Mia drops to the ground, landing on her feet. She sheathes her swords and grins at me. “I love these things.” She exclaims happily and I grin. The swords are a new addition to her arsenal that I suggested a few days ago. Since then, we found a pair that she likes from dungeon loot, and she’s grown accustomed to them pretty quickly. Her power level has absolutely shot through the roof.

It’s now July 17th 2023, three weeks since the day that I first got my powers, and one week since the day that Skylar decided that she would fully trust us. In the time since, we’ve made leaps and bounds in our power levels, with Mia having jumped a full 20 levels. This is partially due to the inclusion of swords into her combat capabilities, her training with them as well as training to incorporate her magic into her weapon usage. The addition of a melee weapon was very much approved of by Mia’s grandfather.

As a result, she’s now an extremely formidable opponent. Thanks to the additional physical training and the different style of magic training, her agility and spellpower have both gone up significantly. She’s now a higher level than Olivia was the last time I saw her, which is really strange to think about. Not that Ivy and I are too far behind that.

As we get inside Mia’s place to take a break and wait for Skylar to get here so we can have some lunch, a window pops up that I’ve been waiting for, for a few days now. Ivy and I sit down so we can make the decisions we need to.

As I promised Ivy last week, I take the sturdy skill after double checking with her. That’s an easy choice, and we move onto the next one.

This is a bit of a tougher choice. Range upgrade is out for the moment, as we can’t afford it. Between dual healing and mana punch, I favour the latter at the moment. Dual healing is something that will be necessary down the line, but given that Ivy only has 3 different people that she might need to heal, it won’t be necessary any time soon.

Mana punch on the other hand is something that gives Ivy the ability to deal a little more damage in a pinch. It probably isn’t a super powerful ability in the slightest, but it’s at least something. The higher level we get, the less Ivy is going to really be able to stay out of combat. She needs to be able to handle herself even if her primary role is a healer, so with Ivy’s blessing, I pick the left option.

This option is a lot more difficult than the previous two. Each upgrade is good for different reasons. Automatic levelling would be really useful because it would mean that Ivy won’t have to eat all of the loot we find anymore to keep up in level with me. This problem has been growing more recently, to the point where soon we’ll have to start ordering things from the auction just to level her up.

On the other hand, a material upgrade could be very useful. A stronger material means more damage resistance and better protection for Ivy. It would give her an immediate upgrade to being a lot more sturdy than she is now. But if I understand the refined body skill that she has, she’ll eventually get to that material anyway. That choice really only speeds up the process.

Biomancer is interesting for a whole different reason: it increases the scope of her abilities beyond just combat and healing oriented ones. The ability to be able to grow food from her mana is something that should not be underestimated; if we were trapped in some kind of a siege, it would be instrumental to being able to survive.

I also have a hunch that choosing the biomancer ability might lead down a path of letting Ivy have more plant control for offensive uses, which would very much fit in with the character she takes her appearance from, and her crystal having the spirit of nature attribute. This could be really powerful in the right circumstances.

I turn to Ivy and share my thoughts about each of the options with her. “This is your decision. There are a lot of potential benefits to each option, and they have wildly different effects. What do you want?” Ivy stares at the window, reading and rereading each of the option descriptions. She takes her time to consider before answering.

“I do like the idea of being able to grow plants and potentially being able to control them sometime down the line. If nothing else, picking the biomancer option would allow me to be able to feed our guild consistently and make some pretty flowers for a garden. I want the automatic levelling option for now though.”

“If biomancy shows up again later, I want to take it. But automatic levelling solves the problem of needing more resources for me to level up. Who knows how big of a problem that could be in future if we don’t solve it now?” Ivy explains her reasoning. Nodding, I touch the option, and one final window pops up.

The extra spirit choice makes me freeze for a moment, but then I relax. It sounds cool on the surface, but there are a few problems with it. I don’t have a spirit crystal and I don’t know how to get one reliably. I got Ivy’s crystal from a quest, and I currently have no active quests. I also don’t want to become a summoner.

Even though I’m technically a summoner already, it’s not really my style to go down that path fully and concentrate on getting a bunch more summons. The mana cost would probably increase substantially with each of them, and I’d have to focus more on that subset of magic. It could make for quite an overpowered build, but if done right, a battle mage build can be every bit as overpowered. And a battle mage is much more my style.

Between the fast and the slow reset, I favour the slow option. This is mainly because I don’t want Ivy to lose a bunch of the skills we’ve gotten for her so far, it would set back her power set by quite a bit. She would probably get them back, but the slightly faster levelling speed isn’t worth sacrificing all of her skills for. I check with Ivy and she agrees with my reasoning, so I hit the slow reset option. With that done, I check both of our character sheets.

Our character sheets are looking good, and I’m proud of our progress. We both decided to invest in our social stats a little more because we felt like we were doing really well on the combat side. Both of us have gotten a few more stat point milestones in the last week, and we got some interesting bonuses out of it. I got my Wisdom to 100, which netted me a huge bonus.

The result is that my mana regeneration was substantially increased, to the point where it’s now measured on my character sheet as mana per second, rather than mana per minute. The increase has meant that I can regenerate my mana bar completely in a little under 7 minutes, which is a huge improvement from what I had before. Ivy and I both got a similar bonus for getting our charisma to 25, one which I’ve had a lot of fun with.

Ivy’s happy with her hair colour as it is, so this bonus didn’t really matter too much to her. I on the other hand, have always wanted to dye my hair but have been too afraid to bleach it. I have very naturally soft hair and didn’t want to ruin it with bleach. This bonus does away with that issue entirely, and so after trying out a bunch of different hair colours, my hair is now a dark red colour that I absolutely love.

We’re currently focusing on getting Ivy’s wisdom stat up to 100, because we both feel that her mana regeneration is a bit of a bottle neck at the moment. Having to wait so long between dungeons for her to regenerate mana is a bit of a pain. We did get her libido to 25 though, which resulted in a little window that made me incredibly excited to read.

It’s made for a bigger variety of things we can do during sex. Mia was thrilled, if slightly terrified, at the prospect of in her words “Two dicks attached to two gorgeous women that I love”, to play with. I’m just as thrilled about it, I’ve always loved the idea of sucking dick and having someone fuck me, but as a lesbian, I’ve never been into men. Women with dicks solves that issue for me. And tonight, Ivy is going to fuck me for the first time.

Pushing the excitement and horniness out of my head for the moment, Ivy and I head to the kitchen and dining room where Mia is making lunch for the four of us. “Skylar says she should be here any minute.” She informs us, as she puts the finishing touches on the chicken pies that she’s made for us. Just then, there’s a knock at the door.