Chapter 647 - Countless Joyful Dawns I

AN: First chapter of book 16! THE FINAL BOOK BEGINS!

69 Years after Elaine became a professor at the School of Sorcery and Spellcraft

I lay on Iona’s bare chest, idly tracing a finger down her belly. I could grate cheese on her abs. I had, just to prove it could be done. My mind wandered all over the place, before settling in on the words, the dissatisfaction that had been steadily building.

“I’m bored.” I told her.

Iona gasped in mock-horror. I wanted to facepalm. Our positions, the situation… over 200 years old, and I was still expertly putting my foot in my mouth.

“For shame.” Iona rolled over, pinning me under her. She started to nibble at my earlobe, and I gasped as her hot breath hit my neck. Ooooh, that sent tingles shooting all over. 

“That’s not what I meant!” I tried to protest, putting the weakest token effort to freeing myself from Iona’s lascivious grasp.

“If you can say the words ‘I’m bored’ after, I’m clearly doing a poor job at things. Let me fix that!” Iona growled, and I got very distracted from there.

====

Three hours later, we were soaking in our oversized bath. Thank you [Manor]!

“Seriously, you mentioned being bored. Those are the scariest words I can imagine an Immortal saying. I imagine you’re not going for yet another advanced degree. Tell me more.” Iona said as I was cuddled up in the crook of her arm.

Iona wasn’t wrong about the advanced degrees. As rule-focused as many professions were, there was still an underlying ‘truth’ to many of them, and between my senses, speed, multitasking, and the fringe benefits of the School, I’d picked up quite a few additional accreditations. I’d gotten very little time to practice most of them, but I was a recognized lawyer, engineer, architect, accountant, mind healer, natural scientist, and half a dozen more. As I picked up specialities, I needed less and less work to get more. The mathematics for engineer and architect were mostly the same, for example.

Iona had picked up a number herself. She was a mean musician, an expert theologian, and her beer was significantly better than Aegion’s. Which was setting the bar on the floor a bit. She could dance all over the world, from taverns to fancy ballrooms, perform ballet and theater to make people weep, and had recently taken up calligraphy.

At the same time, I had no practical experience in most of them. I’d never argued a court case. I’d never seen a building I imagined erected, I’d never needed to balance anything other than our personal books. I kinda wanted to use some of the skills I’d been acquiring.

I’d had a good amount of time to organize my thoughts.

“We’re Immortal. We’ve been at the School for a good number of decades. Sara’s long graduated, married, and doing her thing. I’m working on the rune project, sure, but it’s just not enough. I want to see the world! I want to try every job, every profession. We’ve got eternity stretching ahead of us.”

Iona hugged me a little closer, and picked up exactly on my thoughts. The benefits of a long marriage.

“I want to climb every mountain.” She said. “I want to swim in every river. Sing every song.” Iona nodded once. “Yeah, let’s do it. Leave next week?”

I lightly slapped her chest in mock horror.

“That’s the middle of the semester. No!” I protested, only for Iona to chuckle. I rolled my eyes and snuggled back in, enjoying how the warm water enveloped me. “Okay, you got me. You got me good.” I freely admitted.

We’d need to get Auri and Fenrir onboard, but I didn’t think that’d be too difficult. Fenrir enjoyed the sheer number of cases being brought to him on the Island, but seemed a little bored at how frequently they repeated. There were only so many times he wanted to investigate cheating cases, romantic or academic. 

Poor wyvern. Had nobody told him most private eye work was romantically related?

Auri… might be trickier, and I felt a little bad. People from all around the world made their way to the Island, and she was able to interrogate them on various baking techniques, on top of being best friends with the various professors. She’d even guest lectured at the School now and then.

“What should we do first?” Iona asked. “Guards? Couriers?” She paused a dramatic moment. “Adventurers?” She teased.

“No!” I gasped in horror.

“I mean, you did say every job.” Iona grinned at me. “That’s a job. Might as well see it from the other side. Get a new appreciation for things.”

I whined in protest.

“I have to see this now.” Iona’s grin went from one ear to the other. “Elaine and Iona! Adventuring team supreme!”

I sank half under the water, blowing bubbles resentfully. 

There was no way.

There was absolutely no way -

=================

“Welcome to the Adventurer’s Guild! How can I help you today?” The [Receptionist] cheerfully greeted us.

Crow take Iona and her wonderful silver tongue. I knew she could talk me into just about anything, and she proved it. We’d established a few basic rules for our trips around the world.

The biggest one was: Commit to the role or career we were playing. Make it authentic as possible, experience life in that way. That meant display the levels we wanted to be, or in Iona’s case, fudge her level to simply display question marks. It was a glaring flag, but one with some plausible deniability. The enchanted ring generating the effect might as well be screaming ‘SKETCHY THINGS GOING ON HERE’, but people might guess Iona was around level 500, not level 1500. Iona couldn’t lie, thanks to her [Vow], and the ?? display was the compromise we’d settled on. 

It meant we were using the funds we earned to pay our expenses, with a reasonable start up investment. No tapping our endless wealth to make things easy, that’d be boring, and the entire point was to combat boredom. When traveling, we’d use the travel accommodations of the role we were in, but we weren’t going to deprive ourselves of [Manor] when we had a ‘home’. That bit was cheating - we could get high quality luxury accommodations paying rent for the cheapest place around - but hey, we’d earned it.

We were going to obey our underlying mandates. Iona would happily step out of her role to defend the meek, while I wasn’t going to pretend I wasn’t a powerful [Healer] if anyone asked for help. We were also going to stick to our ‘true’ skill levels, mostly to not allow bad habits to form. For example, I was playing at being a [Swordswoman] of some sort right now. I was going to use the absolute best forms I knew. I wasn’t going to deliberately let my guard down, allow sloppy openings, or not block something with my shield, assuming the stats I was trying to display allowed it. Down that route lay the total degradation of our skills, and eventual death if we stayed in the sloppy habits during a real fight. In the same way, it wasn’t like I could make [Sentinel’s Superiority] level down, and our passive skills would guide us like they always did.

In short, we’d look like masters of the field, in whatever field we tried.

Then a couple of joking extra rules were added, like ‘don’t light any pigs on fire’. Part of me wanted to laugh at the likelihood of such a situation cropping up… the rest of me knew that rule would end up becoming relevant at some point. The more I thought about it, the more likely it was to be a problem.

We also promised to be flexible, and adapt as things came up. They were guidelines, moreso than hard rules. 

The point was to have fun, not torture ourselves.

For any given job, we’d try it out until we stopped having fun. Honestly stopped having fun, none of my good natured whining about [Adventurers].

“Hi!” I said, practicing being the face of the group. “We’d like to register as adventurers, please?”

It had taken long practice in front of the mirror to be able to get the sentence out without stuttering or laughing at myself. And by long I meant all of three minutes, which was an eternity of torture given the subject matter.

She looked back and forth between Iona and I somewhat doubtfully. Which… yeah.

My companion bond with Auri was too high. I almost literally couldn’t do anything without prettying myself up first. Between that, and the sparse-but-quality equipment I had, I was giving off ‘entitled rich young adult off on a Bad Idea’ vibe hard. A little unintentional, but that’s how things came together.

Iona, meanwhile, wanted to practice her archery. Naturally, she went the extra mile and tied a blindfold over her eyes, to help her vision skills and practice seeing with her other senses. Her tattered-but-deadly look was giving off the bodyguard vibe, which reinforced my ‘young miss’ look.

Eh, it was all about having fun, and we were both giggling over the pranks we could pull on people. Iona had been right, bored Immortals were a menace.

“Alright, can you please fill out these forms? There’s a forty arc registration fee. We have people who can read and write for you if you need it.” She said without batting an eye. We probably didn’t even crack her top 64 weird events this week.

I grabbed the forms and forced myself to slow down as I filled them out for both Iona and myself. Iona radiated smugness, and I had to work hard not to laugh at it. She obviously couldn’t see, so I had to fill out the forms for her.

They were pretty basic, and I slowed myself down to more reasonable speeds. The basics were expected. Name, class, a rough description of skills we wanted to talk about. I put down Dawn as my name, but picked an older language that was rarely spoken on the opposite side of the planet. I was willing to bet nobody in the entire town had ever heard of it, and even Arachne might struggle to connect the word to me. Part of it helped reinforce every bad thought I’d ever had about Adventurers, asking all sorts of questions about criminal history and locations we were wanted in. 

I cheerfully wrote down Suen and tax evasion. It should get a laugh, and it was technically true! Just… horrifically misleading, and played even more into the ‘spoiled rich girl’ trope.

“You were right, this is great fun.” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth to Iona. She hadn’t stopped smiling since we got in.

I was also listening to the conversation around us. The Adventurer’s Guild wasn’t terribly packed. Populations were still recovering, and people waiting around here weren’t out working and earning money. A few people were hanging out. It had sounded like they were discussing working together on a bigger job before we’d asked for registration paperwork.

“Look at that rich girl.” One of them said with as much scorn and disdain as I’d ever heard. He rose his voice a bit. “Oi! This is a dangerous job, not fun and games!”

Iona slowly turned her head towards him, and fixed him with… I wanted to say a steely gaze, but given that she had a literal blindfold on, it didn’t quite work.

“You want a fight?” The man challenged. Iona openly smirked at him, inviting a fight. The adventurer’s friends talked him down, and I handed in the filled out forms to the receptionist.

“An [Archer] and… a self regenerating [Warrior]?” She asked. “Can you heal other people?”

“Yup!” I cheerfully answered, only for all eyes in the place to end up on me. 

Right. I knew the theory of front line [Healers] being rare, but they weren’t the rarest in the army.

As an [Adventurer] though? Why take the risk here, when it was far more profitable to stay back and heal the idiots coming home, or if I had a lust for battle, join the army? I’d been with the School and the Sentinels a hair too long, I was forgetting what ‘normal’ life was like. Another point for Iona’s plan. 

Her eyebrows went up.

“Well. Next is testing. We like to do that in batches, and the next round is in a week, at first bell. Is there anything else I can help you two with?”

I shook my head, skimming through the quests posted on the board. Goblin extermination - we were going to skip that one hard. Classic escort mission - it was one of the things I approved of adventurer’s doing, we’d probably take that. On a different board, they had some ‘epic’ quests posted. One caught my attention as a problem.

S-Ranked Quest

Reward: 20,000,000 arcs.

Find the prison of Thraximundar.

For countless eons, Thraximundar has been trapped in a secret prison. We wish to find him, and…

I knew exactly where his prison was, and could easily communicate the information for an easy 20 million arcs. I also knew what a horrifically bad idea that was. I knew why he was trapped, and why it was important that he stay there.

No, I was mentally assigning myself a new quest. Find out who’d posted the quest, and have a polite discussion with them. 

Actually, one better - I could give the quest - ahem, sorry, case - to Fenrir, and let him sort it out. It was up his alley. I could already feel the stormclouds starting to roll in.

Focus.

The thought of taking the adventurer’s ‘test’ filled me with glee, and I rubbed my hands together as Iona and I walked out of the place.

I had to admit, once again, she was totally right.

This was a ton of fun.

======================

We assembled behind the Adventurer’s Guild slightly before dawn. I was wearing tighter clothes - didn’t want anything loose fouling my movements - along with ‘my’ greaves, a short sword of the type I’d been trained on, and a full fuck-off tower shield. Again, what I’d trained on. An open-faced helmet completed my look.

A surprisingly large number of applicants were assembled, along with a good number of existing adventurers. No prizes for guessing the job of the slightly-higher-level [Adventurer] with the fancy armor. My yawn almost cracked my jaw.

“Getting up this early is a pain.” I complained to Iona. She snorted her amusement, as all the [Adventurers] in earshot shot me dirty looks. Fewer than I thought, they needed to work on their senses.

“They’re probably trying to weed out the uncommitted, or people who can’t follow basic instructions.” Iona said.

“Why?” I wondered. “Don’t they need the warm bodies?”

“They need warm bodies that can listen to basic instructions, or their reputation gets torched.” Iona said. I didn’t need her to say the rest - the more people weeded out and forced to redo things, the more application fees they could collect. I was being a bit of a cynic, the fee wasn’t that bad, and the Guild’s cut for successfully completed quests was probably higher. The town bells started to toll, and I could see a few frantic people trying to sprint the last stretch to the meeting place.

“Listen up!” The [Guild Master] roared. “All of you think you’ve got what it takes to be one of us! Adventurers! The elite!”

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing, and trying to suppress it just left me snickering in the middle of his speech. We were getting all the dirty looks, and Iona had resigned herself to facepalming, even going so far as to shuffle a step away from me.

I didn’t blame her.

The [Guild Master’s] eye twitched, but he gamely continued on with his speech.

“Today, we will separate the wheat from the chaff! The men from the boys! We will see who is worthy of the honorable title!”

The speech went on in that vein for some time, the energy that came along with my mirth had waned, and I found a second yawn threatening to break loose. I decided not to commit murder via aneurysm - not that it was possible, everyone here was in the absolute peak of health thanks to me - and hid behind Iona before letting it loose.

“First! We’re going for a run around the town! Follow me!” The [Guild Master] said, taking off at a… well, he was jogging, but it wasn’t exactly quick. I slung my shield over my back, and took off.

I was reminded of the average mortal soon enough as most of the applicants rapidly fell behind, to the vicious mockery of the [Adventurers] following at the back. Iona started to casually walk after the [Guild Master], her walking pace more than enough to keep up with him.

I ‘jogged’ a bit myself, rapidly got bored, and started to cartwheel next to the [Guild Master], just barely staying within the stats I was ‘supposed’ to have. He did a double-take.

“What do you think you’re doing!?” He barked at me.

“Following you. Mostly.” I glibly replied. My answer had started with my head up, and ended with my toes pointing to the sky. Iona started to shake with laughter as his eye twitched. 

“Do you think you’re funny!?” He yelled. I heard a few snickers from the established [Adventurers]

“No, I mostly think you’re slow.” I honestly told him.

Do no harm, do no harm. I reminded myself as his eye twitched again, and his face went red with rage. I was effortlessly keeping up with him, and I couldn’t keep cartwheeling as he moved from a jog to a run. Instead, I started running backwards, [The World Around Me] helpfully letting me know where to place my feet. We started to lose the rest of the group, Iona excluded.

“Come on everyone!” I cheerfully encouraged them. “You can do this! Pick up those feet! Left, right, left right, I believe in you!” I was also shamelessly giving Iona a show. Her skills let her see through it without issue. I knew exactly what the tight clothes were doing.

A combination of a pretty woman shouting positive encouragements, plus with how effortless I made it all look, had most of the people picking up the pace to stick with us. A few did drop out, and ended up mercilessly mocked by the trailing [Adventurers], but I grudgingly had to give it to them. If they couldn’t manage a light jog like this, if they lacked the conditioning to run for ten minutes, they were going to fucking die out there. 

I was clearly on the [Guild Master’s] shitlist, but he wasn’t bodily throwing me out. Yet.

“You’re not allowed to make him ragequit his job.” Iona softly murmured in my ear.

“Hey!” I softly protested back. “I hadn’t… thought of that… yet… okay, yeah, I totally would’ve tried it if the idea came to me.” Iona knew me too well, and she winked behind her blindfold.

The run felt far too short for me, but then again, Iona and I conditioned regularly, and at our level, that took a lot more than a quick single lap around one town.

“Alright you lot! Basic strength is next. Keep your gear on! Drop and give me 40 pushups!” The [Guild Master] shouted.

I went down and started doing them one-handedly. Iona smirked, went one-handed, then lifted herself up, her feet pointing to the sky, as she did hers.

“Showoff.” I muttered.

“Like you?” She teased back.

“I thought we weren’t trying to make him ragequit.” I said.

“You are not allowed to make him ragequit.” Iona snarked back. “I am.”

The poor man looked like he wanted to protest our mild subversion of his instructions, but didn’t have a leg to stand on. Nor did Iona, for that matter. We were doing it harder than he asked, and much faster.

After doing forty pushups on one hand, seeing most people weren’t even at twenty, I swapped hands and did a second set. Iona still beat me - she was restraining herself to ‘more’ stats than what I had. The earlier dirty looks were slowly being replaced by more respectful glances. We were, after all, putting our money where our mouth was in terms of skill and abilities.

We spent the next few hours going through various workouts, with more and more people dropping out. The number of pauses, water breaks, and shade involved didn’t exactly raise their standards in my mind, although I was glad to see everyone under level 64 got weeded out. Far too young to get started in this business. They still had their whole life ahead of them.

Lunch made it clear why so many [Adventurers] had stuck with us, and half of them descended on the provided buffet. The other half were hovering near Iona and I, and I had a bad feeling about it.

“Congratulations. As of right now, by the powers vested in me by the Adventurer’s Guild, all of you can call yourselves an [Adventurer]. You should all be offered a skill now, and I strongly suggest you take it.”

Oh no.

Oh gods no.

Ciriel! Help! I cried out in distress.

What’s wrong!? The immediate reply came back.

I’m about to get offered the Adventurer’s Skill! My dignity can’t take it! Stop the System! I begged.

There was a long pause, followed by hysterical laughter.

Oh no, you’re on your own. I’ve GOT to see what you’re doing.

I blew raspberry noises in her direction, as Iona started to softly laugh like a hyena next to me.

Hey! After the ‘miracle’ I performed a few days ago, you sold me out to the Moon Goddesses!? I protested.

Yup. Just trying to help your lovelife. Ciriel teased back.

My lovelife is fine! I protested.

[ding! You’ve been offered the General Skill [Adventurer’s Advantage]. Would you like to replace a skill with this? Y/N]

Nooooooooooooo.

The adventurers descended on us like a wave. The babble was nearly incomprehensible, but the chorus was clear.

“Join my team!”

Iona fended them off, we ate, and it was off to the afternoon activities.

“Listen up! All of you start off as F-ranked adventurers. Today, here and now, we’re going to see if any of you deserve a higher ranking. A higher ranking means more trust is shown, means you can take higher ranked missions, and most importantly, you get paid more.”

Mercenaries. The lot of them. Heck, mercenaries were more honest about… I was going to mentally shut up. 

With a quick kiss, Iona went off to the archery section, while I went off to the sparring ring. With how the numbers were drawn, Iona was going before me… and they absolutely rigged the hell out of the lots, I was paired against the [Guild Master]. I’d watched it happen, and let it. Why not, he might have an interesting trick to show me!

I wandered over to where Iona was and joined the crowd. The archery test was somewhat practical. A skill made a number of mannequins burst out of some bushes and rush towards the archer. The test was to see how many, how quickly, the [Archer] could shoot. 

Iona went up, and she briefly bowed her head in prayer.

“Begin!” One of the [Adventurers] shouted, and a number of ‘goblins’ burst out of the bushes, rushing towards Iona.

She nocked an arrow, drew her bow - blindfold still intact - and pointed it backwards, aiming at the crowd. There was a great wave of ducking - except for me, I had faith - and she fired her arrow towards the guildhall. She remained posed like that, arm straight out, bow lightly vibrating, as her arrow shot out.

What followed was utter bullshit, a combination of [Fancy Trickshot] along with Iona’s newer [Divine Luck] skill. [Divine Luck] was a Gravity skill that made ‘minor’ adjustments around Iona, without her thinking about them, to better help her along. 

The arrow bounced off the signboard, deflected off three walls without breaking or slowing down, rang the town bell, nicked a cart, then went through all the targets in order, from the furthest back onwards. The arrow neatly went through the ‘kill shot’ on the chests, before hurtling towards Iona. It ended its flight back in Iona’s bow, and she twirled it before putting it back in her quiver. She took a bow to thunderous applause.

“Showoff.” I teased her.

“One arrow, sixteen kills!” She fistpumped. “Beat that.”

I snorted.

“I’m not even going to try. What do you want me to do, throw my sword and decapitate half the crowd?”

“So I win.” She said. I sagely nodded.

“Yes you did, you won cooking dinner tonight.”

“Awww yes.” Iona was irrepressible.

“Dawn!” The [Guild Master] barked. “Stop ass grabbing and get over here!”

I smoothly vaulted over the fence to the dueling arena, ignoring the weight of all my equipment. I smoothly swung the tower shield onto my arm, then rammed it into the dirt, unsheathing my sword in the same motion. I crouched behind my shield, hiding most of my body, and angling my sword properly.

It took me longer to get in the proper sparring mindset. If this was being done as an evaluation, I couldn’t hurt the [Guild Master]. If this was a friendly spar, I could poke him a little. And by that, I meant stabbing him all the way through. 

“Begin!” He yelled, and swung at me with his longsword.

“Sloppy.” I said, darting forward at speed. I put my gladius through his obvious opening, pinpricking his armpit before retreating back behind my shield. He stepped back with a reluctant nod, and I felt better. He’d deliberately left the opening. From there, he opened up, and… I think he tried to fight me with everything he had. It was hard to tell, he wasn’t particularly amazing. Maybe as good as a career soldier, or a Ranger at the start of their career. I helpfully pointed out everything he was doing wrong, trying to help him improve, all the while staying at the correct speed and strength I was supposed to be displaying. Overwhelming him with stats was no fun, after all.

“Slow. Distracted. Opening. Poor form. Keep your blade up. Not that far up. You’d be dead here. Dead again. This is why we use shields. This is why we don’t try to bash shields down. You can’t outturn this stance. Too low.”

Each remark was punctuated by my sharp steel sword jabbing out, hitting the problem spot. The [Guildmaster] clearly didn’t get out too much, which was a little surprising. His face got redder and redder as our spar continued, until eventually he stepped back.

“Enough!” He practically snarled. “You’ve made your point. Next!”

I smugly strutted back to the edge of the area, getting my own set of fans and cheers. Iona beamed at me, and leaned over.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to get him to rage quit?” She asked.

“I’m not trying to!” I protested. “I was trying to help him out! I had to, otherwise it wasn’t a spar.”

“Love you.” Iona said.

“Love you too.” I agreed. “You were right. I’m having fun.”

[ding! [Everywoman] leveled up! 864 -> 865] 

[Name: Elaine]

[Race: Chimera (Elvenoid)]

[Age: 208]

[Mana: 57,166,200/57,166,200]

[Mana Regeneration: 125,426,603 +(784,663,487)]

Stats

    [Free Stats: 0]

    [Strength: 347,516 (Effectively: 2,780,128)]

    [Dexterity: 371,772 (Effectively: 3,958,628)]

    [Vitality: 1,090,276 (Effectively: 17,035,563)]

    [Speed: 1,077,508 (Effectively: 21,208,590)]

    [Mana: 5,716,620]

    [Mana Regeneration: 12,980,372 (+ 78,466,349)]

    [Magic Power: 7,297,984 (+ 596,975,091)]

    [Magic Control: 7,296,841 (+ 596,881,594)]

[Class 1: [The Elaine- Celestial: Lv 1636]]