Nathalia remained in her true form even after she pulled her claw out of Thana. The earth shook as the dragoness laid down in a giant circle around them, her head resting on the floor close enough that one of her enormous eyes overlooked the whole scene like a nearby sun. John noted that the crystal that normally rested on her chest now made up her vertical, snake-like pupil as he wiped sweat off his forehead.

“Could you maybe dial down the heat a bit?” he requested. The sun thing hadn’t just been a metaphor because they were glowing and orange.

“Are you not afraid of this form, John?” the dragoness asked, while obliging his request.

Interestingly, as her body cooled, her splintered appearance became less translucent. Even though it had been barely shimmering through before, he could still see the magma flow inside her, but the shattered surface approached a more solid black.

“Well, I am definitely in awe,” John said, putting a hand out to touch her head. Her glass like skin was expectedly smooth, and he had the basic wisdom to avoid the splinters and small spikes over it. Those would have made for a very mean cut. Not that he needed to care greatly, thanks to Gamer’s Body. “But I am not afraid; as a matter of fact, I am wondering more about how you can formulate words without lips,” he stated.

He knew she had a tongue, that liquid organ (of course it was made out of lava) he had been able to spy. “How like you to forego reason in favour of needless questions,” Nathalia pointed out and chuckled accordingly.

“Well, I don’t need to be afraid of people that can control themselves,” John said and turned over to Thana. Just having gotten to her feet again, the blood mage quickly keeled over backwards as a blow of hot air assaulted her.

John looked back to Nathalia just in time to see one of her many teeth slide down into its original place. So, while she didn’t have lips she did have retractable teeth. He didn’t even attempt to understand the anatomy of a dragon, a god-level unique one made from magical obsidian and magma no less.

“Exhausted?” John asked and walked over to Thana. Extending his hand, he stood in front of her, and she looked back with shame.

“I did it again,” she noted.

“Yup, getting a bit old,” John admitted. “You get one more ‘get out of berserking free’-card, after that I will learn advanced psychology and you will have to pour your heart out for me, young lady, no matter your complaints about that.”

Thana made a displeased grimace but took his hand without comment. “Or should I call you corny nicknames again?” John suggested to lighten the mood a little. “Blood queen? Curse and blessing of my life? My broken angel?”

“That last one is so fucking bad,” Thana complained. “Just stop, you asshat with your dumbass fedora, that’s like the third time you used that and each time makes my skin crawl worse than the one time it was literally peeled off!”

That was more like it.

“Did you at least get the epiphany you wanted?” he asked.

“I think?” Thana said in an unsure tone and looked at Nathalia. With the sound of a shifting mountain, the dragoness raised one of her hands again. The fact that she had an opposable thumb was incredibly humorous to John. What could she even want to grab at that size?

Either way, he cleared the area as the house sized claw hovered above Thana like she was a bug to be squashed. Which was probably exactly what the dragoness was planning should the blood mage go into a rampage again.

“Soulburn,” the single word of power was uttered, and the pillars of energy returned with an unceremonious flare. Compared to the violin guided violence that was Bloodburn, the silent burning of the steady flames was almost eerie. It was just so completely calm that John couldn’t help but wonder about the storm.

Then they vanished again.

“Okay, so, this thing FUCKING SUCKS!” Thana screamed at the world.

“Care to elaborate?” John probed.

“It literally burns my emotions away,” she said and repeated the word, “Soulburn.” The flames flared up, then they were gone again. “And now I am no longer angry,” she said in an irritated tone. “Oh fuck me sideways and let me eat a double bacon sandwich cooked on the cock of a dragon, this shit is weird. I don’t like it, as a matter of fact, I fucking hate it. It doesn’t even cost me anything else to maintain but it does because I am no longer feeling a thing. IT’S SO FUCKING WEIRD!”

“At least you are angry again,” John said in a dry tone.

“Yeah, thank fuck,” Thana said, “I don’t like this emotion meddling bullshit. Going to keep this shit buried in the ‘final solution’ drawer.” John kept his comment that that joke was pretty tasteless to himself. If the literal holocaust victim wanted to make jokes about herself, then so be it.

“And now?” John asked.

“And now what?” Thana returned the question.

“And now what are you going to do?” he further specified. “You got what you wanted to achieve in training, but we still have two more days, so what are you doing with those?”

“Get this shit to work better,” Thana said and looked at her hands; “I don’t like how it works but it’s still as strong as Undine’s indecisiveness was fucking annoying.”

The ocean elemental inside John cringed a bit in shame at that but kept quiet. “Okay, just don’t go berserk again… how did that even happen?”

“I have no fucking clue,” Thana scratched the back of her head. “May have started burning my ‘common sense’ by accident and then had to wrestle against that scratching. You know, the usual ‘being-stupidly-assfucking-fuck-ass-mad’ stuff.”

John kept the ‘don’t do that’-comment to himself. He had already called enough things out for the past few minutes. Instead, he pulled out his phone and checked the time. It was already closing in on 7 PM.

He decided he would much rather spend the whole day tomorrow with Jane than check-up on whatever she was doing this late into the training regime. Talks over the dinner table had made it sound like she was doing some meditational stuff anyway. Something about getting accustomed to using her mana in new ways.

“I will be on my way then,” he let them know. “Nathalia, I think you can handle her better if I am not in danger of getting killed on the side-lines.” He was already in motion to raise his hand and cast Escape I.D. The skill failed, and he was left standing there like an idiot.

“You are not leaving just like that,” the dragoness let him know while her body started glowing.

Like hot iron pulled straight out of the furnace, her core areas were white-hot while becoming redder towards the edges. The massiveness of her true form sunk together and concentrated where her head was laying.

A few moments passed, heat blazing, then the molten material formed the curvy body of a woman. She quickly cooled off revealing her day-to-day form. The fact that she was stark naked and the wetness quickly starting to grow between her legs made it abundantly clear what she wanted before John left.

Thana threw off her robe, annoyedly cursing at the giant hole in the back, and threw off her remaining clothes as well. John just smirked and opened his inventory to get rid of his clothes.

_________________________________________________________________

The rest of the day was filled with that threesome (Nathalia was very needy, apparently not having had any other intercourse during the whole day) and John running a dungeon. The latter he did just to get some change from his routine and check out the loot.

What he ran was the Tier 20 version of the City Elemental dungeon. Inside, he found some rather weird creatures called ‘White Robes’. On the front of enemy design, these things were rather discomforting.

They were literally flying white robes, but underneath their hoods were disfigured faces, dead branches sticking out and red light shining from their mouths and empty eyes. They were grinning, like skulls, and had no attack whatsoever.

They dealt damage via colliding, or rather not colliding, with an enemy, flying their untouchable bodies through whatever victim they chose. There were two major annoyances with these enemies: they had the aggro pattern of ‘locking onto one enemy and then chasing them for all eternity’ and being immune to all attacks that weren’t magical or had the Touch of the Abyss attribute (or something in the same ballpark).

In other words, Aclysia was busy punching at the things not chasing her, John was throwing shards at the ones chasing Aclysia, and the elementals were just kiting. While their attacks did have large magical properties, they were still way less effective for their mana cost than usual. With one exception.

“Whoooosh, shuuuuush, hihihihi,” Sylph made weird noises and giggled as she threw her attacks at the enemy. The green energy waves cut through one of the white robes, who quickly reassembled only to get hit by five more and then vanish completely.

So, John used this for a bit of research. As the enemies were fairly easy to deal with, they moved very slowly, so they weren’t exactly dangerous outside of getting stuck between a bunch of them, he could search for some unwilling test subjects that were the same level and then bombard them with 100 mana attacks until they died to find out how much mana would be needed to kill them.

The end results were rather predictable. Sylph used the most amount of magic in her attacks, Salamander was the next on that list, then Undine and finally Gnome who used the least amount. If John had to put it into percentages, which were a fairly educated guess, Sylph’s attacks were 90% magic, Salamander’s 75%, Undine’s 50% and Gnome’s around 30%. That was, of course, just for the attacks they used baseline.

As Undine hesitantly switching into her Unleashed mode and then ripping through a whole wave of attackers so wonderfully showed, the elementals could adjust the amount of magic infused into their spells. It was a simple but very undertrained skill that they had. John noted to make this a future thing to make them all better in.

Siena was not part of this list whatsoever since she could freely manipulate from the start. ‘I have all kinds of experience in using knives,’ she informed John upon request and laughed seductively.

Eventually, the boss spawned, which was really just a flying temple that constantly spewed out more White Robes. Interesting in design, it was also a rather easy target, and so John took it out with a 5-minute charged Arcana Strike.

All in all, this dungeon hadn’t been all that interesting. Kiting was a fine mechanic, but if it was the only thing he could do for like 30 minutes, it got very stale. However, he got a rather interesting drop.