Chapter 54
Training Grounds
Mary stared out at the snow-filled training ground for a moment longer; in some ways this was a momentous occasion for her, as such she was now increasingly aware that she was about to take the first step outdoors in her entire life. This was a familiar feeling for the young princess, but unlike when she first left her bedroom and followed Sylvia to the secret library.
Unlike the last time she found herself at an important crossroads for her future, this time the princess didn’t need to rush to follow her maid and, as such, could appreciate the action she was about to undertake.
{It’s only the outside; it’s not that big of a deal.}
One of her opinionated internal voices remarked with increasing exasperation.
‘It is for me!’ Mary retorted, ‘I’ve never been outdoors before, and look! Actual real snow.’
The princess felt more than she heard the internal sigh, but it was nonetheless followed by the semi-familiar sensation of agreement from the second minds within her.
Her pointing out the snow was not unreasonable.
By the time Alexander had been born and subsequently died, global warming had allegedly been solved – but a declaration like that was something people would only believe if they were inclined to listen to the government. Not once in his life, while living in England, did he ever see snow outside of virtual reality, which might have debunked this outrageous claim.
In centuries past, England would have significant snowstorms; the Thames itself could freeze over. Even with global warming "solved", none of these things had ever happened during Alexander's life.
But it was undeniable that Earth’s global temperatures had been slowly returning to what they should have been instead of the terrifying peaks that they had started to reach.
It was just a pity that Alexander, and by extension Mary, would never get to actually see the genuine effects of that reversal.
Due to this and her current youth, Mary felt entirely justified in feeling excitement about the possibility of seeing real snow; in fact, it wasn’t merely seeing, she could play in it too, in the ways that Alexander had always wanted to. Of course, considering she was living in a mountainous kingdom that experienced significant snow all year round, the second minds within her felt confident that she would grow sick of the frozen water soon enough.
Finally, her internal deliberation done, the princess shook her head and took a giant step forward into the open air. Mary, with characteristic care and deliberation, planted her foot into the snow, eyeing the limb with an intensity that made it clear she was looking at it more than physically.
Instead, she eyed the spell that coated her feet and should be cushioning her steps.
Mary planted her foot and distributed her weight onto the limb, listening carefully for any sounds over the clash of steel in the yard beyond.
The princess narrowed her eyes, her recently enhanced sight failing to catch even the slightest indent in the snow.
‘It worked.’ Mary thought in relief.
{Between the spell that Sylvia gave us and our current physical weight, that’s not a surprise.} One of the second minds mentally agreed.
Mary nodded in agreement and took another step, and then another. The princess quickly started to gain confidence as nobody reacted to her entry into a place where she absolutely should not be. With her secrecy confirmed for now, the princess begins to head not toward the fighting figures in the training yard but to one of the small stone structures that were off to the side.
The princess was not entirely certain what these structures were; her best bet would have been either some sort of bench or a type of plant pot. However, neither of those possibilities truly explains why they are present here.
Perhaps it was something she would raise with Sylvia at some point, but only witnessing the maid's surprise at the maid as she realised that Mary had snuck outdoors without her knowing.
Nonetheless, for her current purposes, these unknown stone structures do have a very useful function; Mary would be fully capable of hiding behind them. This, Mary is certain, will be especially useful once Sylvia arrives.
The maid had helped Mary develop her current suite of stealth spells, and as such, if there was going to be anyone in this training yard who would be able to spot the infiltrating princess, it would certainly be the former B-ranked adventurer.
The young princess shook her head in annoyance at her continued failure to hide from the too-powerful super maid.
But Sylvia had not yet seen the current spell iteration. There was a real possibility that the maid would be unable to see her, due to her not having the chance to identify any new weaknesses in Mary’s stealth.
For this occasion, Mary had layered upon herself her most sophisticated spellwork, spellwork that would render her invisible. By this point, bending light to grant her invisibility was no longer a new spell for Mary; in fact, she had created its primitive prototype nearly a year ago. Her understanding of magic and its inherent logic had improved significantly since then, and her knowledge of rune lore had also advanced.
But these days her forays into stealth magic had advanced much further than mere invisibility. Mary had long since taken her maids' advice to obscure the sounds that she made and any scents that she produced. The primitive spells to obscure both of those factors had been simple enough for the princess; the spells themselves had been similar to the light-bending spell that she had created, except with [Sound] and [Scent] runes as their anchor instead of [Light].
Mary had considered other possible variations but found that those three seemed to give the best results for now.
Of course, the next step in her journey to hide her presence from the occasionally obsessive maid had been to merge the three individual spells into a singular spell matrix for efficiencies' sake, if nothing else. The mana logic required to achieve such a merger had proved to be remarkably complex, but once the three spells had become one, deploying her full stealth suite had required less than half the mana to maintain than the three spells together had previously.
Of course, the merged spell was arguably less versatile in its usage. But as a stealth spell, Mary wasn’t entirely certain why someone would want a stealth spell that could give away their position through dismissed avenues.
Nonetheless, the merged stealth suite had been arguably one of the greater successes that Mary had enjoyed over the last year. But that stealth suite hadn’t been enough to hide from the maid; Sylvia always had additional critiques prepared for her.
At the time that she had created the merged spell, her spell lore was starting to reach a wall. Mary was certain that she would breakthrough given enough time, but it had forced her to switch tracks and attempt other avenues of advancement. For months afterwards, the young princess worked hard on her mana control to restrict the amount of mana that escaped from both herself and her spells, hoping that this would not only increase her stealth when hiding but also enhance her spell potency.
As a result of her work, the magic that she was using to hide herself today was totally incomparable to the first-generation spells that she had first created and used; their attached runes too had advanced at a blistering pace.
Sylvia had, as far as Mary could ascertain, genuinely complimented her progress; it was a type of constant encouragement that a large part of Mary enjoyed as the princess had developed her understanding of magic. The maid had even, for the last month, claimed that an average B-ranked warrior—a combatant who was focused on raw physicality rather than magic or scouting— would not be able to discover her when she was utilising the entirety of her stealth suite.
While truthfully, Mary was uncertain about Sylvia's honesty in that regard, it did make her slightly more confident in her current course of action.
After all, Sylvia had claimed that unless a B-ranked warrior knew that she was nearby hiding, they wouldn’t be able to spot her.
And yet the maid, who was supposed to be a B-ranked warrior with little interest in magic, could still spot her with apparent ease. And Mary had genuinely done her best to create situations that could surprise the maid.
That was one of several main reasons that had led her to this training yard.
In truth, the princess wanted to find out how much of Sylvia’s claims were nonsense. It was a risk; Mary could freely admit to that internally, but her maid could be so odd sometimes that the princess was never quite certain about how serious she was being at any given moment.
The other major reason that she had come to the training yard was right in front of the princess, and so she turned her attention away from her hiding place, away from the past. Instead, she focused intently on the knights who were currently practising in the yard.
What she immediately understood, something she had expected, was that the heavily armoured knights were, unsurprisingly given the political situation of the kingdom, all men. This was not something that shocked the princess; rather, it confirmed to her that Sylvia's claims and the assumptions that Mary had made upon her birth were not entirely nonsense.
Upon reflection, this was not a good thing. At all.
The next thing that Mary noticed was that these knights were much more physically capable than they should be.
Far more capable even.
Given the fact that they were all wearing what was presumably heavy plate armour, they were moving too quickly.
As Mary watched a pair of knights duelling, their limbs and swords a literal blur that she could scarcely see, the princess truly understood that she had severely underestimated exactly how significant the benefits of magic accumulation were.
{It’s strange if you think about it.}
The system of the world has no true ‘level’ system; there are no ‘stats’ as would be understood from what would be considered a typical game-like world. And yet, something exactly like it exists, completely undocumented.}
{We were arrogant to assume our efforts in that area closed the distance at all.}
Mary restrained a sigh at her internal voices' assessment; they were right. Of course, she had arrogantly assumed that her progress with biomancy would have closed this gap.
At least a little bit.
The princess had long since gained a relatively decent understanding of Sylvia's and her own biology and had, with excruciating patience, flesh-crafted improvements based on the template that Sylvia represented.
Clearly that was not enough.
Before this moment, Mary had been fairly certain that she was at least equivalent to what could reasonably be expected from a high-level augment on Earth, potentially far beyond her age group even. She had, over the months since her immediate success with flesh-crafting, carefully done her measurements and gauged her reaction times.
This was why Mary, despite being not quite two years old, felt reasonably certain that she could have successfully arm-wrestled an adult from the early twenty-first century. Briefly Mary allowed herself a smirk at the image that was presented to her but lost it again as she looked at the duel heating up and its participants becoming a blur of motion.
Mary grimaced as she considered things further. An augmented adult of the late twenty-first or the twenty-second century would have been beyond her current self, but even they would have fallen short of what she was witnessing right now.
She secretly stood in the hidden corner of the training yard and once again chastised herself for underestimating how significant the benefits of magic were.
It was something that she should have understood by now, having used magic every day for nearly two years now.
{But not physically.} One of her second minds said this in an attempt to soothe the physical princess.
Mary nodded, grimacing at the reminder.
‘I’ve been exercising, but how much does it matter? Sylvia's only mentioned mana accumulation from combat.’
{And we haven’t had much in the way of success from meditating.}
The princess nodded grimly.
They’d figured out how to push mana into various body parts to enhance their functions, not just her muscles but also her organs.
But the accumulation had been intolerably slow; the benefits from doing so had been so infinitesimal that they could only be seen over the course of entire months. This situation was a stark contrast to what Sylvia had described when she first discussed it.
Supposedly simply killing a handful of goblins would have surpassed months of meditation on her part; that was a piece of information that was highly annoying.
Mary blinked as she noticed a change in the yard. The sound of constant fighting was missing.
In the place of the clash of steel was a thick tension. Mary looked at the knights and couldn’t help but notice the dread almost coming off of them in waves.
All of them were looking in a single direction, and Mary knew what, or rather who, she would see when she joined them.
Entering the yard with a slight smile on her face was the beautiful and graceful maid that Mary had gotten to know over her time on this world.
But more importantly, Mary saw the maid’s angle and smirked as she noticed that Sylvia's entry point meant that the maid would not be able to see Mary's hiding spot without physically turning to face it.
The princess crouched down further and had a final thought as she watched the maid.
‘This ought to be interesting.’