Almost three months had passed since Layla was being under the apprenticeship-of-sorts of Myrna, the mage teaching her different mana controlling methods and few elemental spells to add to her repertoire.

Layla enjoyed quite few of these training methods as they were not the typical "believe in yourself! Otherwise, believe in me, who believes in you!" method of what she usually saw in other isekai stories from her previous life.

Oh, that method of training exists, but not really used that much.

One of the methods Myrna trained her in is the "separate water and sugar" method, along with the similar "separate sugar and pepper" one.

She basically had to use her mana, along with the water element to drag the water out of the cup, and leave only the sugar inside. Works for training her water elemental control as well.

Layla had also learned how to cast multiple elemental spells, including fireball, water ball, gale, rock movement. All of them self-explanatory from just their names.

There were also non-elemental skills one could learn as long they have mana.

One such basic ability is Body Augmenting, which basically allows a person to use mana to improve their body's speed, strength, and whatnot.

Layla was told by Myrna that this basic skill doesn't increase someone's intelligence, neither does it automatically raise their control over their higher powers, so Layla must also train in controlling that aspect as well.

If her teacher's explanation of why she should was not enough, her moment of almost dashing uncontrollably a couple of meters in fraction of a second and possibly hitting a tree if it wasn't for Myrna stopping her body definitely did the trick.

It took a lot of effort to basically control her Augmented senses and limit them to a fine level, and she also didn't ignore the similarities and differences between Body Augmentation and her time magic.

Body Augmentation increases physical strength, speed, and in a way, it seems like time slows down or stops if your senses were too high, but it isn't a real time manipulation. One downside is, you should learn how to fully control your new "stats" in a way.

Time magic, when she was for now only using the same way as "The World", meaning; stopping time, gives her a "world" where everyone and everything is in a state of pure motionlessness, and she doesn't have to worry about finding herself flying by mistake if she accidentally jumped. The downside is that it consumes more mana than body augmention.

Still, time magic is ridiculously broken, and she didn't try anything with it, like accelerating time, or rewinding it.

Those ideas will be explored when she fights monsters, along with her space magic and other elemental affinities.

Currently, she was given a month of vacation of sorts from magic tutoring, as Myrna deemed her well-prepared for the basics at least, but told her to keep training carefully regardless. Myrna herself had her own chores and duties to do at that period of time as well, and it couldn't be reasonably expected for her to simply abandon her daily life forever, so it was also a break for Myrna just as much for Layla.

Layla herself took almost three whole days doing nothing but lazing around, just either wandering in the castle, or occasionally seeing her brother's magic training, and his instructor, that, just like Myrna, was also wearing mage/ wizard clothes, only blue instead of Myrna's purple outfit, with a staff containing a blue jewel.

Oh and he is also like, handsome, Layla saw, and didn't look any older than 40 if even that. Just like her father, and the butlers in her house, or the few influential nobles she had seen talking with her father in the few parties she went to...

Seriously, is it too difficult to have a normal-looking adult guy in her list of "important person who is not fat and/ or gives weird vibes"? She knows that this is the world of an otome game, but the amount of attractive people in this world is mind-boggling, Layla almost believed that there's no "plain-looking" person there, until she recalled all the commoners she saw when going in carriage, then recalled, that yes, plain-looking people exist.

One of the mysteries of the Otome Game reincarnation, beauty exists and it will probably come for you if you were deemed "important".

That digression about beauty in isekais aside, Layla had felt that those days, she was finally ready to actually fight monsters, and see for herself just how powerful she currently is, and grow even stronger.

---

'So, to increase my magic reserves without training, I should kill monsters.'

The fifth day in her sort-of vacation from magic tutoring, Layla decided to read about dungeons, and also questioned her maids and butlers about them.

She had been reading a book about the history of the dungeons, how they came to existence, what their reasons to being, and all that.

To sum the whole story, the dungeons were originally created by the goddess Aana to be places for humans to seal and contain monsters, and were at a period of time, used to groom heroes of certain generation or age to increase their power and skills to fight in the legendary wars of before, when angels and devils were not extinct, and their wars had consequences for the humans and other races.

Now though, as time went, and the need for war was slowly being destroyed (to a certain point anyways), Aana declared that just like gravity, air and the world exists, so will the dungeons.

Slowly, but surely, newer dungeons, far weaker than the original ones, and more suited for the current era, started to appear, with only enough difficulty to give a moderate challenge to a well-prepared group of adventurers/ normal knights. Still pretty lethal for unprepared challengers though.

Layla learned that like typical depictions of dungeons, every one has at the very least 10 floors, and the difficulty rises with each one of them, until you defeat the "boss" monster.

And in this world, monsters don't conveniently give drop items when killed, unless you count their weapons as drop items. If you want to get something from their bodies, prepare your skinning tools and skills, because that would be needed.

What they give instead is the essential thing to make your magic reserves bigger.

Layla learned that somehow, when a human kills monsters, the human gains an amount of the dead monster's mana and add them to their reserve. Wether it's a big amount or a small one is generally decided by luck.

Naturally the dungeon makes the monsters unable to gain mana from killing other monsters except in unique cases, so that way, weaker dungeons don't suddenly have epic level monsters spawning in them.

So basically, Layla has to kill monsters and she will rapidly grow stronger.

And of course, since basically anyone can increase their mana resevoir this way, there were a lot of restrictions on who enters dungeons, and all dungeons in the kingdom is always protected by a group of (royal) guards/knights. And most adventurers have some limit for how many times they can enter dungeon every month, and if they want more, they have to pay a good amount of money to do so.

Layla realised that this was made so none of the adventurers, which most of them were commoners, can get enough power to overthrow the nobles.

One of the consequences of things no longer being a game, Layla reasoned. And she completely understood it as a very practical move.

Even more so since this kinda reminded her with school (and society to be honest) in her previous life.

Those with influence make rules to strip those weaker than them from effectively resisting their rule. It's basically the same here, except there's magic and world destroying powers now.

Not that it will stop her.

---

Once more, Layla thanked the fact she has unique magical affinities.

For a royalty, and one so young, as well, she had expected a lot of resistance to her deciding to just go to a dungeon on her own, therefore, she decided to get away from the house with the use of time magic, and rapidly going out of the castle, a map and few knives on her along with a cloak to hide her figure at the dark of night. Their household has an excessive amount of them, so a dozen knives won't be missed at least. She knows that.

Waiting to make sure that all servants are asleep along with her family, she immediately leaped from her window after, using her body augmentation to rapidly leave the house without being seen or heard, with the occasional time stopping to make sure no one might catch her if they were still awake. There should be some guards at least to check the cities at night.

Looking at the map, she saw one of the many dungeons for newbies in a forest close to her position, and she amped up her body even further, as she almost turned into a blur in the black sky as moon shined, and it took only what felt like a dozen minutes for her to finally see the area of the dungeon, and as she predicted, there were guards protecting it's entrance.

Taking cover under a tree in the forest, she took a moment to recover herstamina, before she stopped time, and quickly entered the dungeon as the guards were frozen, using a small amount of mana to use as a light source, and went down the stairs, and when she felt safe, time resumed, as the place was illuminated magically as reaction to her presence, a challenger.

Layla was sure that the guards won't hear her now, and went on her way, knives in hands.

She took a breath, and a thin mana wave expanded from her body, and she immediately felt it, different presences, some closing to her from afar, while others are only on the ceiling and walls of the dungeon.

What she had just done was a magic technique called "magical search"; it basically works like movement/heat detectors in her previous life, except it can detect mana in living beings.

Naturally, people with enough control can hide from it, but in this dungeon, in the first floors at least, will be almost mindless monsters like slimes, goblins and zombies, with the possible appearance of magical giant bats here and there, so they don't really have any real awareness or intelligence to consciously control their mana for stealth.

Layla, sensing the one closest to her, looked, and what she saw was a blob-like being that was slowly moving towards her.

It was a slime.

The monster in question looked semi-transparent and blue-colored liquid that had a nucleus inside it's body.

A bunch of other slimes were seen by her just barely a meter behind the first. Using her sensing spell, there were almost a couple dozen slimes, as no other different-looking monsters appeared around her.

Layla stared at them for a moment, making sure to not let up her magic search spell, before picking up one of the knives with her.

Augmenting her body and running towards the slimes, her figure blurred as the world almost slowed down from her perspective, and rapidly entered her hand into one the semi-liquid bodies, taking away the nucleus, while attacking another slime with the knive, directly at it's core.

Returning back to her position, she watched as the bodies of both slimes she attacked and destroyed/stole their core had disintegrated, turning into light particles, before a tiny part of the light rushed towards Layla, entering her body, while the rest disappeared.

A small feeling of power rushed through her, as she felt the slime's mana being consumed and turned into her own, causing her to smile.

"So this is what gaining power -what 'level up'- feels like in this world. Marvelous~!"

The increase of her mana was truly fascinating. It was like a kid eating their first candy. It was almost euphoric.

It also nearly restored a sixth or so of the amount of mana she used for the Body Augmentation.

'Killing slimes is truly a benificial choice for a beginning to grow stronger!'

With that, she picked another knife in her free hand, and smiled towards the small group of living blobs.

"Now, die for me."

She didn't increase her speed this time preferring to run normally, and directly faced the slow monsters head on, easily stabbing each of them in the nucleus, killing them and gaining a fraction of their mana.

A few tried to attack her from behind, but her legs, albeit short, worked just as well as knife in crushing their cores.

A couple of slimes, one blue, while the other red-colored, shot a waterball at her, but Layla sped up slightly, evaded the attack and killed the creatures only a few seconds later.

The only thing that stayed as their bodies disintegrated was their cores, most of them shattered, and Layla sighed in contentment.

Not a bad start.

"Let's keep this up now!"

With that, the girl used the search spell again, and felt nothing new in the floor she was currently in, and went to the second one.

The same magical light illuminated the place slightly, and her senses picked up almost triple the amount of presences she felt in the first floor.

Most of them were closing on her from both sides and in front of her, while some of them were on the ceiling.

The sound of steps was heard by her, as her eyes looked around her.

The figures around were quite far, almost a couple dozen meters away from her, but she could almost see humanoid green figures along with bouncing blobs.

"Slimes and goblins, huh?"

Her senses warned her of the monsters above her rushing towards her from the ceiling.

She raised her hand, mana concentrated.

"I've tried physical attacks, let's see how strong normal magic is now. Fireball!"

A ball of flame with a half meter diameter materialized in her palm before shooting towards the beasts.

One of them, a slime, couldn't dodge, and was directly hit.

It's body disintegrated due to the magical attack, leaving only a slightly scorched core that fell on the ground, as a fraction of it's mana became Layla's own.

The others, a couple of giant bats and two more slimes, Layla realized, were unharmed.

The slimes fell to the ground without taking any damage.

The bats on the other hand, were flying above her in frenzy, shrieking at her.

Layla used mana to jump high in front of one of the bats before it can react, and pierced her knife in it's head, instantly killing it.

The second one that was flying towards her with it's mouth opened, she pointed her palm towards it, and spoke one word as mana flowed through her.

"Gale!"

A blade of wind was created, and rapidly moved towards the bat, slicing one of it's wings.

"Kieeee!"

It shrieked in pain as it fell to the ground, almost at the same moment Layla also reached the ground.

"Rock movement!"

Small pebbles around her responded to her mana, and rapidly accelerated towards the slimes and the injured bat, piercing their bodies and killing them.

Layla didn't pay much attention to her mana increasing, and looked at the bigger group of monsters getting closer to her, only ten meters away.

The figures were now clearer to see, and she found out that the goblins had weapons, mostly clubs, swords and daggers. No mage goblins as far as she can see.

'They will take a moment to reach me. What should I try now? I used body augmentation, and multiple normal magic spells.'

Her mana almost flared.

"Let's try this then."

She held two fingers in front of her, and quickly tapped into her memory of the various magic spells and attacks from movie and anime series she saw in her previous life.

"My power. Heed my command. Make the laws of space under my control!"

Layla visualised it. An attack that bends space and ignores physical defenses to strike the opponents in front of her.

She focused, instictually feeling her mana changing into space-elemental energy, growing on her fingertips.

"Spatial Slash!"

She moved her raised hand in the form of an arc, and an arc of energy grew from there, increasing in size as it moved swiftly towards the shrieking goblins that were too slow to escape or instictively duck.

The arc easily killed the struck targets and with no resistance, as their bodies were sliced in half, blood flowing from their corpses.

"Haa!"

Layla gasped and almost dropped on one knee as a feeling of being drained made itself known.

Just that one attack had taken almost a fifth of her current amount of magic reserves.

'Damn! Just one attack of space magic took away that much of my current power. Better not use it again until I grow my power sufficiently.'

With that, she stood up, her knives on hand, as she Augmented her body, and stabbed the goblins in the head, or slashed at their necks, killing them.

The slimes as well were easily dealt with, and soon, she was the only one alive, as the place was filled with the shattered cores of smimes, or the corpses of goblins.

Layla looked around her, and at herself, her clothes bloodied and red.

It was really lucky that water magic can clean clothes from blood.

"I should leave these alone and advance, but..."

Looking at the goblin corpses, she could see an interesting opportunity to test her magic.

Making sure that no other monsters were around the floor, she moved towards one of the corpses.

She felt nothing from the sight of the corpses or the blood, aside from the mild annoyance at the nasty smell of the blood.

"Now that I think of it... Aren't I too detached and uncaring towards this sight? This was the first time I killed a humanoid being. I am pretty sure I should be puking right now."

Layla murmured to herself even as she knelt in front of the corpse, it's face in the form of the shocked expression it took before dying.

She sighed.

"I will care about it later. Now. Let's see what I can do with this."

What she was trying to do was to see new aspects of her Matter magic.

Matter magic, from what she read, changes the shape and constitution of a chosen target. It does have some similarity with the fundamentals of other elements, such as earth magic that allows the user to change the constitution of earth/rocks to a limited degree. But that was it. Most elements only give limited access to the ability of changing an object's constitution.

So regardless of how much someone tries, they can't change a random rock into gold.

Matter magic, on the other hand, gives the person full control over that, if Layla's estimations were correct.

Once more, she focused her mind on other shows she saw in her previous life. One scene in particular in her head.

The scene from a show about atom/matter benders, where a punchy rebellious guy retaliated against his edgelord-wannabe ex-boss who was sort-of his father, and turned his ex-boss' body into a piece of fargile black-grey rock, allowing a punchy midget boy to punch the edgelord-wannabe with god complex to be banished to the Not-Shadow-Realm where the villain had to learn calculus and history and other things forever.

Mana flowed from her, and covered the corpse.

'Slowly build the image. Imagine this body's atoms, being under my control. Mine to understand, and change as I see fit!'

Slowly, in the back of her mind, something was making itself known.

A connection, Layla realized, linking her to the body.

It was not a fully formed one. The connection was almost like there was a glass barrier separating her from completely controlling it. She still needed to take hold of it.

And she will.

Carefully mentally closing in on the connection, she felt more confident in herself, until it looked like the link was just in her grasp.

She reached for it...

"Aahhhhh!"

And a headache slammed into her head, causing her to reel back from the sudden pain, as she screamed, clutching her head.

Information, knowledge she didn't know suddenly shoved itself in her mind. Names of atoms, molecules, cells and microorganisms, what their jobs were, and many more info made themselves clear to her.

She could barely realise, between the headache, her scream, and the miniature sea of information, that her new knowledge was about the state and composition of the goblin corpse she made contact with, and it will be almost ten seconds later that she will stop screaming.

She breathed heavily as her body shuddered, and only after a minute did she manage to get a grip on herself and slowly stood up.

"Damn. My head feels like I got smashed by a hammer! At least, the pain is diminishing."

She groaned as she now processed the knowledge that was slowly stabilising in her head.

Now she understood that the Matter element is not so easy to deal with. If this is what happens whenever one tries to learn it, the headaches and sudden literal info-dumps alone will make them stop.

Layla though felt she can, no, will train in it.

If getting migraines and headaches was part of the process of her getting stronger, she will have to just suck it up and deal with it.

Besides, it wasn't that monsterously big of a headache. She didn't black out from it. At least, it was possibly only slightly higher than some of the worst headaches she experienced in her previous life when she forgot to sleep for a day or two.

She will manage it.

Quickly looking around and "searching" for monsters, she found none.

Layla returned to the dead goblin's body and once more she used her magic to make the connection once more.

This time, the link of the connection felt a little more easier to find, and once more she grabbed it.

Once more, knowledge was shoved in her head, but she gritted her teeth, and barely managed to keep the connection as knowledge stabilised itself once more.

Breathing heavily again, she soon realized that a new feeling made itself known to her as the connection was no longer unstable.

The sensation of power, of control.

Layla could feel it, just like how one could taste the food.

She can control it's composition. The goblin's corpse.

Layla can feel it in he bones, the ability to reshape this object to whatever she wanted, to change it's atomic structure as she desired.

And she did so with no small amount of glee.

Slowly, she commanded the body to disintegrate the head, and destroy the atomic bonds in that area.

A sensation of drain seeped though her, not as much as she felt when using space magic, but it was there.

And she saw as the head turned into a pile of ash-looking atoms.

'First step, is success. Now, let's see what good of an alchemist I can be!'

Layla once more commanded her mana, this time to change the body from flesh and blood, into charcoal.

She felt it through the link, the atoms changing, transforming the body from it's green color into an ashy one, as every point changed into a charcoal.

The process took only almost a minute, and when Layla finished, she fell on her knees, sweating.

She felt even more drained now, feeling like she only has a tenth or so of her total magic reserves.

"Haa... Haa... Tired..."

She shook her head as if throwing away whatever drowsiness might hit her.

"Better leave for now. I shouldn't risk myself here any longer."

With that, she moved, going towards the exit of the dungeon, and once more, stopping time for a moment as she exited, and rapidly augmenting her body to run without the guards noticing, immediately going towards her house.

After getting close enough, she used water magic to clean herself, before using time magic for the last time for this day, to enter her room without making any sound.

Layla looked at the bed, her eyes looking exhausted, changed her clothes, before almost dropping at her bed, and giving herself much needed and desired sleep.

There was only one thought she had before she fully submitted to her tiredness.

Tonight was very much worth it.