Chapter 17: Chapter 16: The Upper Crust

It took half an hour for Eyfura to come back. “Alice, Tess, we’re leaving.” She growled. “Ilmir is outside, the rest of you can do with her what you will.” She stalked out of the room, not waiting for a reply.

“Yikes.” Alice said, “I don’t think we want to keep her waiting. Come on, Tess.”

She left as well, leaving Tess to say a quick goodbye and follow suit. She passed a rather unhappy-looking Ilmir on her way out, but chose not to engage in conversation, instead following Alice and Eyfura out of the building.

“Right. We’re changing the plan.” Eyfura said, “Once we’re confident Tess knows how to handle a dungeon, we’re just going to steamroll through it as fast as possible. We’ll give her a couple hits on bosses or big groups of enemies for EXP, but other than that we’re just going to kill everything ourselves.”

“Why?” Alice asked, “I feel like that’s not going to be good in the long term.”

“We’ve made a bet.” Eyfura replied, not slowing down. “I bet Ilmir that, in a month, Tess would be able to give her a real run for her money in a fight, despite Ilmir’s head start. So, if we play our cards right, we can get Tess enough Skills to make her able to punch up to Ilmir’s level.”

Alice opened her mouth as if to object, but apparently decided against it, choosing instead to remain silent.

They spent the rest of their day finishing off Rogue’s Den. The last two Rewards Crystals were Tess’s picks, which she put into magic stuff again. That meant another set of All Magic (bringing her up to Basic) and a Skill that provided a scaling increase to her base Mana regeneration, making it always at least 1/900^th of her total Mana per second, or enough to completely make it completely refill in 15 minutes.

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