More than mere adrenalin, the feeling flowing though her was like freedom made tangible. If she wanted to be faster, she knew she could be. If she wanted to hit harder, she knew she could also. With every swing of her sword corruption beast’s blood would spray across the room, even across her body, and the smell was putrid but gratifying. These beasts were like a metre-forty tall dogs with bone spikes jutting without pattern from their skin, like bones grown deformed. They were called corruption beasts because they tainted Salvation and had impure Ren Stones within their bodies, allowing them to use magic along with their strengthened bodies. They were also completely maddened. Normal beasts could at least think to some extent; they didn’t fight hopeless fights and took easy victories rather than taxing fights. Corruption beasts weren’t like that, they just kept attacking until one or both sides were dead. When she and Azure first entered the Quarry, they attacked instantly, and they had been fighting since. The first two died from her Sacram, but it ran out of cylinders just killing them and she drew her sword in panic rather than trying to feed it more. Just seconds after she drew the blade, her panic and fears vanished. Fearless and happy, she desired only to keep swinging until all the beasts were dead, then to ravish Azure on their bodies.

Nearby, Azure also fought the beasts. She likewise wasn’t using her Sacram or the Hybrid Armament, that she had taken to calling a Hybram, and was instead fighting with just her bare fists. She used magic to coat her hand in metal and punched and kicked the beasts. Her hands were small and soft, cute and holdable, but she lashed out with speed and power, breaking through the creatures’ skulls with each blow. Her arms were died blue with the corrupt blood, but she seemed entirely uncaring. Anna could feel her face loosen in desire even as they fought. She had been struck by blows several times already, each time when she got distracted and looked at Azure, but her armour prevented any cuts. She knew she was bruised, though she felt no pain from the impacts and didn’t care much about it. It just annoyed her that the beasts interrupted her view. Naturally she hacked them to bloody pieces as a response, as anyone would do.

When the last of the creatures was dead, Anna walked across their bodies over to Azure and puller her into an embrace and seized her lips as a prize, a reward for her hard work. Azure didn’t resist and responded passionately to the kiss, all the while trying to pry her fingers loose from the sword. When the sword came free of her hand, she almost wanted to let go of Azure and grab the falling weapon, though Azure pressed the attack and such thoughts left her. Less than a minute later, she felt entirely drained. Her entire body hurt with intense muscle pain and there wasn’t a single part of her that didn’t feel strained. She couldn’t even stand as her legs felt like rubber. Azure puller her onto her lap as she lay on the floor and told her to rest.

They started the day by looking for a particular Quarry. Azure said that the horse was hungry and to feed it they would either need to hunt more demons or mine for its food. The horse was apparently able to search for its food, which made sense, but they would have to do the hunting. They landed some distance from any city, though they were vaguely following the coastline, and Azure declared that spot to be the location of a Quarry, despite nothing to mark it as any different to any other patch of ground. Remembering the weeks of work her entire village had gone through just to dig up an entrance, Anna was wondering if it would take months with just the two of them, especially since Anna didn’t want to put Azure’s small body though that kind of hard labour. Before Anna realised what was happening, Azure started to kiss her, deeply invading her mouth with her tongue. Lost in the moment, she barely registered the dirt being flung into the air next to them, and when they broke off the kiss, there was a hole leading into a Lord’s Stone room.

Azure tied a hemp rope, that they purchased in Seojin but hadn’t had a use for until then, to a tree and dropped the other end down the hole. The Quarry was only a metre below dirt, but there was no way to tell how deep the room behind the stone wall would be. Azure pulled out a fire stone that Anna hadn’t seen her acquire and placed it on one side of the hole. She began to sing a continuous loop of Ren’s Prayer, the variety which cause Ren Stones to work their hardest until the singing stops. As the stone turned white hot, the wall it sat on likewise started to turn red. Before long, it was starting to melt, and she sent a bolt of metal into it, shattering the weakened section and making a hole. She then cooled off the edge with a spell and pushed the coil of rope into the gap. The fire stone fell with the rest of the falling stone and it lit some of the room as it fell, though its light quickly faded without the song continuing.

The room was ten metres down with a rectangular shape that was roughly four by twenty metres wide. With the way broken furniture seemed to pile against the floor and there were cupboards sidewards on the wall, it appeared that the Quarry was at one point tipped on its side. That wasn’t a rare occurrence, though it wasn’t exactly common either, and aside from some extra difficulty traversing the rooms it didn’t make much of a difference. It was one of the reasons that miners wore their swords on their backs however. When they lowered themselves into the room, the corruption beasts burst in through long-broken doors on the walls, coming from two directions at once.

Having rested somewhat, Anna was still very sore, but felt like she could at least walk. She had no doubt that she would be in more pain for at least a few days and completely understood how the blade had killed its previous users. While she had rested, Azure filled their Sacrams’ feeders with more cylinders so they would be useful again. With Anna standing again, Azure used a knife to slice into each of the beasts, cutting them at several points to reach in and take out fragments of stones. Each stone chip didn’t do much, but if they were melted down and cast into the right shape, they would form a working Ren Stone. The problem was, identifying what spell was within each chip was impossible for common miners, and the actual shape required for each type was also kept relatively secret. The stone coating each one was made with ensured that opening them to find out would break the stone and commoners weren’t about to break such valuable items just for curiosity. That meant miners had no choice put to sell their fragments to a stonemonger and buy back finished stones. That wasn’t apparently wasn’t an issue for Azure, who was sorting the identical looking fragments into separate piles.

“The way you tell them apart is through mana,” she explained. “You push a little mana in and when it is reflected back into your body its slightly twisted. Each fragment contains only a small piece of the complete spell, and when you melt them together the spell is assembled. The specific shape of the stone is apparently to connect to the stone’s mana source, whatever that is.”

With the piles placed in different pouches and left in a sack by the rope out, they started to climb up to one of the doors. The black sword was once again on Anna’s back, though Azure warned her not to use it again until she had fully recovered. The wall was torn up the beast claws as the creatures apparently climbed their way between rooms. The horse had told Azure the direction of the food, so they didn’t have to blindly search. They made it up and over the doorway, into a square corridor roughly four metres to a side. The light that entered through the hole had no way of entering the corridor, and Azure lit the corridor with a spell. She was able to maintain the light and the metal fists at the same time due to the examination of the Lord Magus’s body. She had apparently grown herself second and third pathways, allowing her to use up to three spell types at once. It was when she revealed that that she let an important detail slip. Azure was unable to produce her own mana and syphoned mana from Anna whenever they came in contact.

“I modelled my Mana Well to exactly match yours,” Azure had said, “yet for some reason mana doesn’t accumulate naturally in it.”

“Then, I can stay with you as much as I want, right?” Anna replied, a somewhat greedy expression spreading across her face.

“You could regardless.”

Just remembering Azure’s cool response made Anna burst into a cheerful smile, locking arms as they walked down the corridor. There were doors above and below them from time to time, but they ignored them. They weren’t miners and were only there for the one thing. Anna did let a delusion enter her head about finding a second Azure, but that seemed like a thought best left saved for later. At the end of the corridor was a stairway, which was still relatively usable to them by walking on the drop side of the stairs and walking along the back wall. If they needed to reach a door on the other walls, they could climb and walking across the hand rails like ladders. As they worked their way downwards to the lowest floor they found the door they needed to get through was on the floor side and locked with heavy drop-bars. In normal circumstances, it would be very hard to lift the bars against gravity, but on its side, they could slide them with just the two of them.

The room beneath the door was strangely shaped; like a ball with the bottom half filled with water. The middle of the room was a giant metal ball, held up by two spikes and the platform that ran from the ball to the door. Azure told her to wait there and guard the door as she climbed down the rail with a sack. When she reached the ball, Azure held onto the rail with just her legs and reached out to the ball. She tuned sections of it and pulled cylinders loose, putting them into the sack, which had a draw string around her waist. When she collected all the ones she could reach, she started to climb back up. As she did, Anna could see corruption beasts approaching. They were navigating the maze of the stairs, so she knew where they would be coming from. As soon as one popped its head out she fired the Sacram. They weren’t moving targets coming from her at all sides anymore; they were exactly the kind of target she had trained to shoot. She shot twice at each one and they died. She remained calm and replaced the feeder when the first one ran out. When Azure rose from the hole, Anna had emptied the second feeder and was about pull the sword. Azure stopped her and drew her into a kiss. The light that Azure had been using to light the room stopped flooding and started to tighten into a cone. As that cone got tighter and tighter, it started to turn from white to blue. When it eventually reached a tightness that didn’t provide any light, she could hear a sharp cutting noise and the smell of melting metal and burning flesh started to fill the room.

When Azure returned her light to normal, there was a line cut through the room, marking the walls, stairs and creatures. It reminded her of the walls of fire that the demons that attacked her village used. However, it was clearly different. Azure’s had been blue, a colour associated with good things, and thus her azure beam was a good thing also. The bodies started to smoulder and caught fire, filling the chamber with smoke. As such they didn’t stick around digging up fragments and left with the horse food. When they climbed out of the hole, Azure went over to feed the horse. She removed the front plate and unscrewed a cylinder, like the ones she just gained, and threw it carelessly down the hole before replacing it with a new one. The remaining cylinders were strapped together and placed in with the rest of their supplies. Azure then insisted that they fly away from the area, quite adamantly.

Setting up camp for the night, Anna felt entirely dead. She could see that Azure was waiting for her to go to sleep, and there seemed to be impatience in her doll like face.

“What are you planning?”

“Since your body is already heavily damaged and repairing itself, its an ideal time to integrate new pathways into your system.”

At that moment, Anna felt the weight of her body and once again fainted in front of Azure. It was a daily occurrence and one that was starting to frustrate her. Luckily for her, she didn’t do so for two more days, since she spent that entire time asleep. When she woke up she found her body was free from pain. She was in better shape then she had ever been, and her muscles seemed stronger and more tone. Her mana flow was faster, flowing entirely without restriction and there were an additional three paths. The new paths not only flowed to her hands, but one of them circulated down to her toes and the third also wrapped around her spine. Otherwise their path was the same, though it would take some practice to get mana along the three paths to arrive at her hand at the same moment. She found it curious that she wasn’t hungry despite being in an exhausted sleep for two and a half days, but it seemed that Azure had taken care of that. Not only had Azure bathed her and changed her clothes, she also fed her mouth to mouth. When she heard that, she felt a mixture of disappointment at not being awake for that and jealousy towards her sleeping self.