DD 301 Ch 1

"Oh, come on, just a hundred more," Crimson pressed.

Sweat dripped off my nose and I could feel the weight of her rear pressed into the small of my back. "Eight hundred and sixty-one," I ground out with another push-up as Crimson flicked away at her CID while sitting astride me with her legs crossed.

"There you go. You still have some energy left. I bet everyone else worked their asses off over summer break." 

I paused at the top of the push-up and glanced over my shoulder, seeing Crimson's confident smirk. "And what would you call our training?" I asked, my voice raspy. 

"Passable," Crimson said, waffling her hand. She managed to say the word with a smile bright enough I had almost thought she had used Eyes of Wisdom. Her bright blue eyes had nearly glowed with the sadistic pleasure she found in training.

I grumbled and went to do another push-up. However, on the way back up, my arms gave out and I fell flat against the floor. 

"I was just getting to the good part," Crimson said, popping off of me and picking me up like I weighed nothing.

If Crimson wasn't known as the strongest adventurer in the world, the gesture would have felt a little emasculating. However, the woman who stood in front of me was by and far the most powerful human. Though since our world had opened up,  I suppose she was no longer the most powerful adventurer. And there was also the fact that I was too exhausted to care much.

Crimson sat me down against the wall and produced a wet cloth from her CID before she began wiping the sweat tenderly from my face. "You're not mad at me for how hard I'm pushing you, are you?" She asked, a hint of vulnerability in her eyes. 

"Not in the slightest," I answered, without hesitation. "We both have seen the Orkai, the Nekorians, and apparently there's seven more cities just as strong as what we've seen in Star City. I'm behind and I need to catch up." 

I found the strength to reach into my own CID and pull a sports drink out of the inventory within the device.

"You're pushing yourself hard," she gave me a knowing look.

"So has everyone else. The only difference is, I have you." As I spoke, my hands were fumbling with the cap. I was so exhausted that my fingers weren't listening to me. 

Crimson plucked the beverage out of my hands and had it open a second later to say, "Ah." She held the bottle up to my lips and I rolled my eyes but let Crimson help me drink. "Well, I must say, even if you're hard on yourself, you're doing great, Ken. Your grandfather just sent me another report on those from your class that decided to hang around the Silver Fangs for training this summer." Crimson told me.

I grunted an acknowledgement but didn't say anything more. I'd known about the training. However, I'd only shown up for it briefly at the beginning of summer break, but then Crimson offered to train me personally. A private Crimson tutoring was not something any adventurer should turn down, and it was not like Crimson left me much choice. She quite literally threw me through a portal half a second after making the offer. 

I had not fought going with her. She was my woman, and I trusted her implicitly.

"You must be exhausted," she said, pulling the sports drink away. "You didn't even look down my cleavage once." 

I choked, a bit of laughter bubbling up through the liquid still in my mouth. I gave her an obvious leer, letting my eyes rake up and down her red leather-clad body.

It splayed open in the front like the lapel of a suit, but then the rest of it hugged her like a second skin, all the way down to a few artful cutouts around her hips and a pair of black heels that added at least two inches. I knew from experience that those heels were also incredibly dangerous weapons, they gave another meaning to a stiletto dagger. 

"There we go. I see you're getting some energy back in you," Crimson winked at me.

She gave me a quick kiss on my cheek while her long black braid fell over her shoulder and brushed against my chest. She snatched it up and threw it back over her shoulder, stood up straight and stretched. Then she walked over to the panel at the gravity chamber's door and began dialing down the pressure. 

I suddenly felt like I was floating in water without the constant downward pull of the intense gravity.

Meanwhile, Crimson strutted around as if it was just another day. "We'll take a break for now," Crimson said. "We know that you'll need to rest up, at least a little bit, before I put you anywhere near Des." 

I chuckled. "As if you're any better." 

Crimson gasped and held a hand to her chest in mock offense. “I'll have you know, that's simply stamina training. And magic training, with your lovely abilities. We can't let Delirious Pleasure get wasted," she said, as if the concept was perfectly logical. 

"Uh-huh," I said with a smirk, amused at her antics. "I'm afraid, though, I'm not going to be getting up, at least not for another few minutes."

Even with the sudden sugar and electrolyte surge, there wasn't a chance that I was going to be able to get my legs underneath me, and I certainly wasn't going to walk around in front of the Orkai looking weak. Some of them were seriously brutal. And more than a few of the groups had marked me and mine as competition. 

"Why don't you tell me what you've gotten out of today's reading?" I rolled my hand towards her, asking her to continue. 

Crimson flipped open her CID hologram. A representation of a book appeared, and she even went so far as to lick her finger as she swiped at the pages. "This one was about the history of Orkai and discovering the mana channels." 

I nodded along. "I see you're preparing for classes well enough.”

“Since we've earned enough to start buying Orkai books, everything that Haylon teaches out of is going to need updating. Just getting a little ahead of the curve." Crimson looked at me, as if waiting.

"Yes, Crimson, you are incredible, amazing. Please, tell me what you've learned," I gestured magnanimously. She was both complex and also simple in that she loved attention.

She flashed me a brilliant smile. "You can't say that often enough. You're right. Tomorrow, we'll have to double the training." Crimson nodded as if she was doing me a favor.

I groaned and rolled my eyes. "What did the Orkai say?" I asked hoping that she’d forget that topic.

"Oh, right." She paused and looked away from the book that she'd been flipping through, which made me question why she'd even started in the first place. "When we level, we can use the CIDs to stimulate the growth of mana channels in our bodies. Stimulating different mana channels affects the stats differently. Those gathered around the spine and the mind might increase your intelligence. Meanwhile, those clustered in the muscles will increase strength. And those around the joints and the connections between muscle and bone increase agility. Stamina largely affects skin and viscera. Magic and mana are slightly unique in that they stimulate the mana channels themselves." 

I motioned for her to go on. I already knew everything she was saying; we had learned all of that freshman year. 

"Don't hurry me. I'm getting there," Crimson chided. "You're always so hasty.”

“I'm an assassin. We strike for first blood. Give me first blood, Crimson." I waited.

"Fine. Mostly the methodology of training. Consistent pressure is more useful than periodic." She gestured towards the gravity chamber panel. "Hence their popularity. The thing that's always stumped humanity, though..." Crimson paused for effect.

I stared at her, waiting for her to continue.

"The thing that's always stumped humanity, though, is why does potential rise with level so significantly. For example, why can't a level one..." 

I followed and hurried her along. “...why can a level one simply not train his entire life and enter the dungeon with wild stats.”

"Bingo." Crimson shot a finger gun at me. "The orkai did some..." She made a funny face. "...live dissections to better understand the changes in mana channels when someone levels up." 

My face mirrored her own. "They're worse than scientists during the world wars, even if they did make important discoveries." 

Crimson looked at me pointedly. "You're half Japanese. And they're the reason we know that 75% of the human body is water.”

“Anyway..." I said, hurrying the topic along. "The orkai did some fun experiments. And what changed about mana channels?" 

"That's the interesting thing." Crimson tapped at the hologram of a book hanging in the air. "What they discovered was that the dungeon itself seemed to participate in reinforcing the mana channels, thereby preparing them for growth and increased strain. Which means..." she said pointedly, "growth is best sought inside the dungeon itself." 

I nodded along. "And that's probably why the seven cities are so important. Because they exist within the dungeon." 

"See? I knew you were my best student," Crimson winked. "But they performed a large number of experiments. Several interesting factors were that damage, small amounts of damage, occur to mana channels during training.”

“Like a muscle," I said quickly. 

"Like a muscle," Crimson rolled her eyes. "However, gaining experience in the dungeon helped repair the small damages from training rather than them healing naturally." 

I made a long noise of understanding. "So you can't simply train yourself to the peak even at high levels. You have to return to the dungeon." I pointed out the crux of the issue.

"Correct," Crimson said. "Which then loops back into the prevailing theory that the dungeon is alive and wants people to push further down into itself. If it is the very mechanism for reinforcing growth.”

“Really, if that's the case, it's done a fantastic job making a system to encourage that. Do the Orkai have any more insight into that particular debate?" I asked, always curious about what would be at the very bottom of the dungeon.

"More scientific guesses. They're quite particular about ensuring that concepts that aren't backed by evidence are not presented. The only thing they do say is that the complexity of everything does indicate that there is intelligent design, either via the dungeon's own growth or, of course, something comparable to a godly design." Crimson answered.

I nodded. "It's good information. Do the Orkai have a particular training regimen in mind?" I pushed towards the part I was most interested in understanding.

Crimson nodded. "For the best ratio, you're supposed to spend at least one day in the dungeon killing monsters for every four spent outside training." 

I grunted at that statistic but nodded in understanding because that was a lot of training.

"And if you train inside the dungeon, it doesn't help so much with recovery. It just makes your growth a little better," she said and slammed the book closed. "Now, that's enough education for the day. You should be recovered enough." She bobbed her eyebrows. 

I rolled my eyes. "It's only three more days until Haylon starts. I was actually wondering how long you were going to keep me down here.”

“I think I only have another day before your grandmother's threats become a little more sharp." She smiled. "Apparently, Sakura is not happy that the next heir to the clan hasn't been training with the new recruits." She waved a hand, dismissing the issue.

"I'll be with them all school year. It's not every day you can get personally trained by The Crimson." I laid it on thick.

"Oh, thank you," she said, coming over and hooking up one of my arms to help me weakly to my feet. "For that. I'll let you pick if we go back today or tomorrow." 

I made a face, thinking about the option, before I let out a sigh of defeat. "We should go back today. It would be good to see everyone and reacclimate before the school year starts." My legs felt solid enough that I walked to the exit of the gravity chamber.

The door slid open automatically, nearly silent except for a small whisper of marble brushing against crystal. It was easy to forget in the bland training chambers that Star City itself was a magnificent creation. Everything was made of a brilliant white stone, marbled with veins of crystal, hooked up to some power source that gave off a faint glow. It made Star City seem like a slice of heaven that was, it even had angels flitting about.

There were the Orkai of course, highly intelligent and moderately condescending green giants. 

I had only managed to take a single step outside the door before one of the big green men bumped his shoulder against me. I'd have lost my footing if Crimson didn't put a hand against the small of my back.

"Oh, I didn't see you there, little human," the Orkai said, looking at his buddies who all began to chuckle. The Orkai weren't all bad, but the younger generation certainly had a healthy, competitive appetite, coupled with a vivid hatred for losing.

Our class had experienced a few small run-ins with the two growing guilds: The Frothy Axe Heads and the Hammers of the Blood Melon. Karnak, the Orkai in front of me that was from the Hammers, sized me up like a piece of meat. 

"You've been training so hard, you should come see if you can compare to Orkai children," he goaded me on, leaning against a wall and only briefly glancing at Crimson before dismissing her. His statement was fairly bold.

Even if he had picked me as his target, Crimson could certainly rip him to pieces in the blink of an eye. Just because she was spending so much time helping me with my training did not mean she had neglected her own.

In fact, I would say it was quite the opposite. Crimson's own training had taken on a brutal efficiency of which I only got the barest glimpse. She was almost secretive, but I knew that coming to Star City had lit a fire underneath her.

Having been the world's strongest and her difficulty in controlling Limit Break had made her stagnant up until the Naga attack. After that, she had gotten far more serious, stepping it up another notch with our journey to Star City. And the discovery of the gravity chambers had given Crimson a firm whetstone she could grind herself against. 

"I think you've got something wrong, Karnak. I train so hard not to compete with Orkai children like yourself, but so that I can measure up against the rest of my party. After all, to a human, the party is everything," I smirked. 

The Orkai snorted. "I had wondered where your gaggle of women had gone," he looked around. "I've only seen a few here and there. Don't tell me they've left you for prospects of better children and genetics?" 

I shook my head at him, a wry smile on my face. "Karnak, if you want to fight, just ask me for a fight. There's no reason to sit here and try to goad me." 

The Orkai leaned close to me, a big smile on his face that showed off his large tusks. "It's more fun to knock down an opponent when they think they can win," he smiled. "Only when you challenge me do I know you're ripe for the breaking." 

"Fine. Fine. I'm going to be busy at least for the next week, so how about three weeks from now? We'll find a gravity chamber and see which of the two of us walks out after we're done." I offered.

"I like the sound of that. You get right to the point. For a demon, you're rather straightforward." He answered.

I did my best to not roll my eyes. Everyone in Star City still thought I was a born demon, even if my incubus transformation was something caused by the dungeon. But being a demon had given me a certain amount of latitude that I wasn't quick to throw away. 

"Anyway, we're leaving." I added, walking away from the Orkai before my legs gave out. Despite my brief bravado, my legs were still shaking from weakness and Crimson's brutal training. 

"You didn't have to do that," Crimson said as we walked out of earshot.

"He wasn't going to leave me alone until he measured himself up against me. Like you said, the Orkai don't state anything as a fact until it can be proven. He wants to prove that he's stronger than me, so that he can go around shouting it from the mountaintop." I shrugged, beginning to better understand the Orkai after spending most of the summer in Star City. 

"Well, that's good," Crimson grinned. "I’m so happy to have another excuse to train you as hard as I can."