A New Star Chapter 105 (Patreon)

Bright and early the next morning I was up and moving, dressed and down into the kitchen before the others. Cain and Francesca appeared a few minutes later, looking fresh and ready, though they had needed a little help from the servants, at least in finding the kitchen and their way around. Not surprising, considering the house was quite large, even if the layout was not particularly complex.

“Good morning,” I said to them, signaling to the kitchen staff to bring over food now that we were here. I would often grab my own out of what they were making, but with guests, it was an occasion where being a little more formal was appropriate.

“Good morning, Lady Alex,” they said in unison, or near enough.

“Eat first,” I said before they could say anything else.

When we’d eaten and the staff had cleared everything away, I signaled to the others to follow and led them out the back, moving across the rear courtyard before heading into the barracks. I pointed out where the quarters, officers offices, armory, and so on where as we navigated the building before bringing them to the training yard. I wasn’t intending to punish them with anything too strenuous today, and I had a decent measure of where they were from being in the capital a few weeks before, but I needed to run them through some drills anyway.

“We are going to train a bit today,” I said to them once we were in the yard. “The elixirs I gave you are working on reinforcing your body, but activity will help them cycle faster. You did remember to drink one this morning?”

“Yes,” they both answered, again in unison.

“Good. We will proceed with a little warm-up and then get to business. First, have some water, then will run briefly and do a bit of calisthenics to get the blood flowing. Follow along with me,” I said before leading them through a short run and some active body exercises.

Once sufficiently warmed up, I had them go through some drills with their chosen weapons, having the two of them work against each other while I commented and gave advice from the side. Neither of them was bad, certainly judging by the standards of this world, but neither of them was particularly impressive, either. By the standards of this world, or this continent, at least, they were doing rather well for their age, considering they were still teenagers and had already made it most of the way through Journeyman. Still, I would have liked to have seen a little more from them, and I was going to not just get them to Expert, but push them through most of the bracket pretty rapidly. The one good thing about the academy system was that their foundations were firmly established; I could be a little quick with moving them along and they wouldn’t suffer from not having the basics mastered.

We ate lunch after practicing and then I gave them the rest of the day to themselves after showing them the library, admonishing them not to take any books out, even back to their rooms, without checking with me first. While the two of them were sufficiently occupied, and rather tired, if I was any judge, I had other things to arrange. I didn’t want to take them deep into the Wilds, not for some time, so I had to chart out where we were going to go and what we were going to do. I also needed to make sure we had everything we needed, though they did have their own supplies. They had no alchemical aids, however, and if they had, they would have been trash anyway.

Fortunately, I had plenty of extra potions and pills, so that was easily taken care of without any fuss. I also had a few extra weapons, though mainly it was knives and daggers; it was always good to have an extra blade or two on one’s person. It could, in a bad situation, save one’s life, and I had long taken that principle to heart, though I didn’t more than two extras on my person. I would have to get an extra made of each of their weapons, which was going to be a bit interesting to do up here. There were a couple competent smiths in Umberton that I could, and the family had a small group of smiths that we exclusively employed, though they were busy. With how many guards we had and the fact that their duties often put them in a decent bit of danger, repairs were a frequent thing, often needing more attention than the rough job the regular troops could do in the field.

Back-up weapons would have to be something that came later, however, as I had neither the time nor resources to deal with it right now. I was hopeful we could get something quite fine for each of them, though I wasn’t hoping for anything like Gungnir, as that was more than a bit of a…special case. Having something that had a decent enchantment and some good strength was almost a must, however, so it was likely we were going to be getting things that were their new primary weapons and what they had could serve as their backups.

With that a future concern, I made a note to stop when I was next in town and discuss it with one of the smiths before moving on to my next task. I needed to brew up some few components, which took me about an hour, and then everything was ready. Tomorrow, we would see about some more improvements to their body affinities before we did anything else, and there were medicines I could compound now that would have a short shelf life but still be good in the morning.

With everything prepared, I checked to make sure no one had any other needs of me before eating and retreating to my room. I had my own training to do, but none of it involved running around the yard and swinging a weapon. My current weapon skills were already too high for that to matter, and I still hadn’t pushed to the peak of what my true skill was. Nor did running in circles for an hour or exercising intensely do anything for my body, as I needed far more for even slight progress on that front. The good thing about body affinities in this life is that they didn’t really decay, so, while I wasn’t going to get any stronger running around the training yard, I wasn’t going to get any weaker if I couldn’t do anything that pushed my body for a while.

The next day dawned bright and clear, as it had for a while now, and I was up before the first light was on the horizon. I had several preparations to make, and then the morning went much like the previous morning. The afternoon, however, was vastly different, in that after lunch I had the others follow me to the lab. For the sake of propriety, which was still a bit touchy in this society at times, Cain had to stand in the hall at first, and then Francesca would be copying him a little later.

She had drawn the short straw, as it were, and was first for a medicinal bath. The two of them had taken all four elixirs I had given them at this point and they were ready for the next step, which was the bath. I had everything all ready, in terms of ingredients, and now just needed a little time to mix everything up, which could be a surprisingly delicate and complex process. Francesca was not particularly helpful in that it was clear she was nervous and psyching herself out of the experience. Maybe I should have had them both wait in the hall until I had the first bath prepared. A lesson for the next time.

“Now, you will do the same as before,” I said to her. “It will be painful this time as well, but it will not be anything you cannot handle, so stop fidgeting and get ready.”

“Yes. Right. Yes,” she said, still fidgeting for a moment before stripping out of the last of her clothes and delicately stepping one foot into the tub. “Ah! That really stings!”

“I’ll show you really stings if you dawdle half in and half out and waste the medicinal effect,” I said in a dangerous tone, though I wouldn’t actually hurt the girl.

“Who even says dawdle?” she muttered loudly enough that I could hear clearly while she finished climbing in the tub and sitting down.

“Under,” I commanded, looking at her still sitting upright.

“I know, I know. Such a taskmaster,” she grumbled, taking two deep breaths, with extra long pauses between, before she went under the liquid.

She thrashed slightly for a moment, but I was monitoring her condition, far closer than she assumed, and knew it was just a reaction to having her head feel the slight acid burn of the liquid combined with being totally submerged. She didn’t continue after the first two seconds, lying in the tub fully under the medicinal liquid and calmly waiting as long as she could. I didn’t know if she had an affinity that aided with holding her breath, but she was able to stay under a surprisingly long time, even with the work we’d done on improving her body so far. Fit young kids that did a lot of cardio shouldn’t be underestimated, I supposed.

“Bah!” she gasped as she resurfaced. “That’s awful. How much longer?”

I raised an eyebrow at her which had her wither, though only slightly. “Ideally, you’d go back under and stay down for as long as you could. Even more ideally, you’d use an affinity, or just barely peak your mouth up to get a fresh breath before going under again. You sitting up like this is wasting medicinal potency. Also, you don’t want your head to be the weakest part of you, do you? That is where your brain is supposed to be, isn’t it?”

“No. I mean, yes? What’s that about my brain?” Francesca asked, trying to piece it together.

“Under,” I commanded her again and she complied, slipping back into the medicinal bath and staying down for another few minutes.

Luckily, she had listened to what I had been saying, even if she was a bit thrown off by my sarcastic questions at the end. She only pushed her face up the second time and took two deep breaths before she was under again, soaking in the medicine for a few more minutes. She did the cycle a couple more times before I had her stop, about half an hour all that this bath was really good for. Any more than that and it was liable to give her a little bit of poison exposure as well, but I was too good of an alchemist to let it get to that stage. I had her sluice off in the shower in the corner before getting dressed again and having her switch with Cain.

The big lad was a bit more stoic than Francesca, including that he accepted the bath a little more readily, including keeping his head under much better without several rounds of protest. I had him also do half an hour before he was done and could wash off and head back up to his room. After the bath, I had instructed them both to do some stretching and slow movements in their room to help the medicine work in the muscles before eating dinner and going to sleep. I know that lying in a bath tub didn’t sound all that strenuous, but it was rebuilding and strengthening their bodies. Many people would need a couple days of recovery afterwards, but they had me making the baths and watching over them.

The next day was the same routine as day one, though I had them train in the afternoon as well before sending them off to their own devices for the rest of the day. I was babying them a little bit, maybe, but the medicine I was feeding them would do much better with taking several days and slowly working through things. This wasn’t some kind of cheap stimulant meant to do one thing, and that thing somewhat poorly. I was feeding them the equivalent of high-grade, custom-tailored nanotechnology, to put it in terms of my last life. Such things weren’t just shoved in the body with the person then given a slap on the back and told to check in after a month.

Not so here, either, as I monitored them both closely over that first week. Once I’d seen they had accepted the medicine rather well and seen some improvement from it, it was then time for an expedition, though calling it that was a bit much. We were going to spend two days and one night in the Wilds, which had them rather nervous, but was not anything to really write home about, not in my opinion. The plan was rather simple overall; I would take them to one of my shelters, though I wasn’t planning on showing them all of them, and describe the idea and preparation behind them. I would then take them to the old mage’s tower and explain what it was and make sure they had basic access. The security system there could allow different levels of access, nor was I worried about them cracking it and getting to something they shouldn’t. Not that I didn’t have confidence in them, but it was quite advanced, and I didn’t either of them specialized in runes in general, let alone security formations.

After that, we would simply explore the mountains. Much as I might want to take them on a long tour of the Shiverwood, that place was particularly dangerous and not somewhere to tread lightly. This little jaunt was much more about getting their feet wet and seeing how they handled being out in the rough and tough conditions. It was all well and good to go to a city or large town where one could walk to a dungeon and walk back to an inn that same night, or to camp out in a dungeon or by one for a day, but the Wilds were different. Our family’s estate was the closest thing to us, or would be for a very long time, and that could be literally hours away at top speed. There was no one and nothing to pull someone’s ass out of the fire if things got hairy other than themselves and the handful of people with them.

Not that I thought we were going to get roasted this time, but it would serve as a good experience for them and a good gauge for me. Also, I wanted to bleed off some of that nervous energy they had; they were eighteen, going on nineteen, and were on the mature side for that age, but they were still teens. They didn’t quite have that depth that seasoned, older hands would have that faced the unknown with a calm and collected exterior, and interior, that I eventually wanted in my team.

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