Was it just me, or was Christmas break an awfully short vacation this year?

Please forgive the shortness of the chapter. I've been dealing with a bad cold, which has slowed my progress down, considerably.

Also, possibly, I may have to stop writing for a while-since I am almost seriously behind on my student loan bills (my life is such a mess).

I'm not dropping the story. I just need to take some time to get well and get things back in place.

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Thera turned to see a rather scary-looking Laura glaring at her.

“YOU! You did more than just read books at Madam Rothema’s didn’t you? What kind of monster training did you accomplish in order to get such accuracy?” Laura said, while grabbing Thera’s shoulder.

“Eheheheheheheh…” Thera wore a somewhat troubled face. And here I was about to finally catch up on homework! “Well, I suppose you might call it that.” She replied.

“No way!” Laura’s eyes teared up. “I’m sorry for all the times I thought badly of you for being sheltered in a safe hidden valley while I was running through the jungle. When, all this time, you must have been training wildly, right? Right?” Her look of pity made Thera feel unpleasant.

“It wasn’t that bad.” Thera tried to brush it off.

“You were probably training day in and day out, without holidays or weekends off, or even stopping to have tea time, right?” Laura asked.

Thera wasn’t sure how to answer. Oy, oy! Aren’t you coming up with a huge misunderstanding?

But, when she opened her mouth to deny it, she couldn’t. She really had trained from dawn to dusk every single day, without giving herself a holiday.

If she wasn’t reading or practicing her magic, she was practicing her aim, or fighting the local beasts…It had just never really occurred to her that what she was doing was work…

“Geez! It wasn’t as bad as you make it sound. Stop making me look like a training fanatic~!” Thera finally settled for a joke to lighten the atmosphere.

“So you really did do something that outrageous!” Laura pointed out.

Thera tried to calm her down. “Like I said, it wasn’t-”

“And? What are you planning to do until Master Thales returns?” Laura asked.

“Of course, I’m going to cultivate! Didn’t you hear Master Thales? He said this place is a cultivation treasure! With this place to bolster my spirits, surely I can breakthrough to Master Class, level one by tonight!” Thera replied

Laura looked at her, an accusing glare on her face.

“So, you’ll cultivate up to Master class tonight. And tomorrow?”

“Practice some empty-handed fighting techniques…Like Bujinkan, Silat, Systema….oh, yeah. I was also going to practice some ninjutsu techniques. Oh, and since I now have a sword, I can do some kenjutsu as well.”

She stopped suddenly because now Laura was looking at Thera with a gaze of absolute horror.

“What has that old lady been teaching you!?” She asked, having never even heard of the things Thera was talking about.

“I didn’t learn any of these from Madam Rothema. She doesn’t know any of them.” Thera said.

“T-then your father must have been extra strict with you the year that I was away?”

Thera shook her head. “My Father also does not know these.”

“…Well, whatever these techniques are, it’s no good! I’ll only give you the rest of today to cultivate. The whole of tomorrow is going to be your very first day off! NO working, NO cultivating, NO PRACTICING. Got it?” Laura suddenly started ordering Thera around, which made her grin.

Pretending to be the onee-san…oh, wait. She actually is the onee-san. Thera was not sure how she had forgotten that Laura was older than her.

Laura’s face was getting scary again. “I said ‘GOT. IT.’?!” She asked, punctuating her words.

In order to pacify Laura, Thera sighed. “Yes…I’ve got it. I’ve got it.”

That was fine. Thera would just simply move tomorrow’s practice to that night and practice all night.

“Good. Dinner will be at sunset. Every minute that you don’t arrive, I will add one more portion of food to the pot.” Laura said. As things were, there was only about three hours left until sunset.

Thera nodded and went to her thinking spot over by the lake. She immediately sat down and meditated to recover her mana.

Once she was full again, Thera threw out her time dilation barrier, stretching three hours to fifteen hours in a flash. Then she took out a book and began reading.

About one hour later, Thera noticed the mana inside of her began to throb, attracting the mana outside her body to collect around her. Thera wasn’t frightened, because she had read about these sorts of things happening during the breakthrough to Master class.

Soon enough, there was so much mana in the area that a transparent, yet visible, mana cocoon formed around her, glowing pale blue at its edges.

Thera was focused inwards. In her mind, she came into a vast dark space with lots of stars. Thera almost mistook them for the night sky, but then she realized that the constellations were not there. This was a different field of stars.

They became brighter the closer she drew. Finally, she was there, among the stars, which then became attracted to her. It was as if they were pulled by a magnetic force, floating to a specific point an arm’s length away.

They circled Thera as if she were the sun. the more the light spheres that joined, the faster the other spheres flew towards her, Soon enough, there was an entire cocoon of light wrapped around her spirit-self, growing brighter and brighter.

Finally, the stars all burst away from Thera’s inner self, sending a small shockwave out from her body into the real world: A sign that she had stepped into the realm of Master class.

When she came back to herself, she laughed. Her mind had never felt so sharp, and as clear as it did now. She felt completely relaxed and rejuvenated in her soul.

Her body felt all tingly, from the hair on the top of her head, all the way down to her toes. After a few minutes, Thera realized that the feeling was only getting stronger.

When she looked inside her body, she gasped. Strands of mana spread out and flowed like veins alongside her blood vessels.

Nothing she had read in any of the books had prepared her for anything like this!

She was extremely puzzled for a long moment, until she thought. Wait, is this perhaps a side effect of training as both a martial and a magic practitioner?

With that, she relaxed. She might not know precisely what powers or effects the mana veins had in her body, but for the time being, they weren’t causing her any harm. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Thera found that her mana ‘veins’ had increased her mana capacity by a lot.

But, upon closer inspection, miniscule bits of mana were being absorbed into her bones…Thera wasn’t quite sure what sort of effect this would have on her, but at least it did not seem like it put her in a disadvantageous situation.

She stood up and threw out a few hundred punches in a mere moment, her fists disappearing into a blur, like the kind you see when you turn on an electric fan.

She continued this way, for a while, practicing at a rate in which any normal person would not be able to follow her movements with the eye.

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Two men stood outside of the barrier, careful not to touch it. “You’re sure he won’t come back?” One asked nervously, his head concealed by a black cloak.

“I told you before, even if he managed to run there, and immediately figure out what had happened, and run all the way back, it would still take any Black-Class at least a day to do so. Moreover I personally saw him leave, so he won’t be back for a day at least.”

The taller man with leather armor said as he slapped the other’s back. “So don’t be such a worry-wart! We’ll be in and out in no time.”

“But, I don’t know about this. What about those two people he brought in with him, this time?” The cloaked man asked, fidgeting with his staff.

“Those two brats? Hah! What about them? Even if they find out we’re here, they won’t be able to do anything about it. They’ll probably just go hide until we’ve gone.” He confidently grinned.

“After all, they’re just kids! How powerful do you think they could be?”

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Thera’s eyes narrowed as a barely discernable ripple moved across the barrier. If she had not been lying on her back to rest after her workout, looking at the sky, she would definitely have missed it.

She instantly rose to her feet. Master Thales ha said that he wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. So, the only other two explanations were, 1. Laura went outside the barrier. Or 2. Someone or something has entered the barrier.

Thera headed for camp.