The sparring sessions of the rabbit and fairy were already winding down when Elise approached, as Nina was clearly struggling to get up every time she was knocked down, and the time it took for that to happen was already getting quite short. The contractor kept on observing without saying anything and sure enough, after a few more falls the rabbit girl simply lacked the strength to push herself back to her feet.

Once that became certain, Elise pulled Nina into her mindscape Room and began to do what she could to heal her injuries (which were pretty light) and her tiredness (which was anything but) while also asking to sight-share with Nalia for helping at remaking her spells.

However, given how much time they had spent together working on spell development, the fairy was already pretty good at optimizing the craft to Elise’s standards, thus the contractor soon decided that Nalia wouldn’t need help for that job and ceased the sight-sharing.

Still, Elise wasn’t satisfied. She spent a minute considering the situation, trying to think of another way to help with the training, even as she kept up Nina’s treatment, until she remembered the laser gun Whitmoore had gotten for her and hit upon a good idea.

“Hey, Nalia.” She called to the fairy while reaching into her bag for the gun.

“What do you need?” Nalia paused her work to reply.

“New training idea. You keep working on your spells, but without losing track of your surroundings, because” She pulled out the laser gun “I’ll be shooting at you with this. It’s going to be on the lowest setting, so it won’t be able to get through your barriers, but that’s not the point, the point is that you need to be able to react fast enough to dodge the shots while focused on something else. It’s situational awareness training.”

“I see. That really does sound like a very useful skill to practice.” Nalia replied.

“Yeah. I also want to do the same thing with both you and Nina while you are sparring, which will be a more effective version of the training, but this is a good way to start.”

“Okay, then let’s do it.” Nalia said before resuming her work.

Elise held the gun and observed the fairy, waiting for her to drop her guard, but at that point Nina recovered enough to be able to communicate properly again, so the contractor decided to work on another matter at the same time.

‘Nina, can you give me your memories of your spars from earlier? I want to see if there’s something you need to focus on in particular.’ Elise asked the rabbit girl, as she hadn’t been able to watch the sparring while focusing on Yura.

‘Sure…’ Nina replied, still sounding incredibly exhausted, before sending the relevant memories to her.

Elise finally fired at Nalia, with the fairy managing to react to the attack but not fast enough to get out of the way in time.

“Fail.” Elise spoke in a light tone.

“Sorry. That shot flew faster than I expected. I’ll do better next time.” Nalia replied.

Elise nodded at her and then began her analysis of the Nina versus Nalia spars. The fairy won the vast majority of them, only losing a few early on from misjudging Nina’s speed and strength, and easily dominating the fights after getting a full grasp of them.

Nalia’s spells were far from optimized, but that was expected. Nina did surprisingly well at coping with the mounting tiredness, which Elise noted with pride. The girl then fired again, but this time Nalia managing to dodge by just a bit.

“Good. That’s the way. Keep going like this.” Elise encouraged her.

“Thanks. I’ll keep doing my best.” Nalia replied.

Elise went back to analyzing the spars, and a few seconds later had a sudden thought upon seeing Nalia ending one of them by firing at Nina in the air. She quickly looked through the rest of them looking for similar scenes and realized that she was right.

‘You’re really vulnerable to being attacked while in the air.’ She said to Nina.

‘Yeah. I tried to avoid leaving the ground, but Nalia kept launching me up with wind magic and the like.’ Nina complained.

‘Hmm… I suppose this is a good time to teach you a new technique, then.’ Elise said in a light but anticipatory tone.

‘Really? And it’s a technique that can help with that issue, I imagine?’ Nina asked, excitement evident in her voice.

‘Yeah. It’s one of those techniques that has variations all over the world due to people needing to deal with those same problems, so the technique also has many different names, including some really pretentious ones like “thousand li descension” or “gravity anchor”’ Elise sounded like she was holding in her laughter while speaking those names ‘But I prefer to call it by the simple name: The Quickdrop technique.’

‘… That is certainly a name that goes straight to the point. And I understand how that would help with my difficulties.’ Nina spoke after a moment ‘How exactly is it done, then?’

‘The theory is that you tap into the connection between your body and the ground and basically pull on it like a rope.’ Elise explained ‘There is a lot of complicated aspects involved, like relative mass and gravitational vectors, but you don’t need to care about any of them to do a quickdrop. You just need to focus on the force that’s pulling you to the ground and then pull back.’

‘And why do I have the feeling that it’s going to take a lot more effort than it sounds to make it work?’ Nina asked with a sigh.

‘Because you are a smart girl.’ Elise replied in amusement ‘But I’m sure you’ll find that it’s worth the effort. The basic level of the technique is pretty much just a way to shift your position while in the air, but further mastery allows for some pretty fun stuff. Some people can use it to go from a dead stop to beyond the speed of sound in a single moment, which turns the quickdrop into a terrifying crushing slam, and that’s only one of the things.’

‘That does sound fun. I guess it’s something to look forward to as I train.’ Nina replied.

Elise fired at Nalia again at that point and the fairy ended up taking a glancing hit.

“Fail. You didn’t manage to keep your focus.”

“Sorry. I’ll do better next time.” Nalia replied.

Elise nodded at her and then turned her attention back to Nina ‘I think this is already enough, so how about we start learning the technique.’

‘If I won’t need to fight Nalia again, then I guess this is fine.’ Nina replied before jumping back out of the mindscape.

“What should I do?” She asked Elise.

“Just jump high up in the air and try to focus on the feeling of falling back down.” Elise instructed her.

Nina nodded and leapt up. She managed to reach close to fifteen meters high on that jump, and Elise felt glad to see that she didn’t leave any marks on the ground from the push, showing that the instant movement techniques had become second nature to her.

The rabbit girl then fell back down, landing easily on her feet with a confused expression on her face.

“Okay, I focused on the feeling of falling down.” Nina said “But I have no idea how I could use that to fall faster.”

“There are other steps to the method, and it is not something that can be learned so easily, so no need to rush.” Elise replied “Now that you have that feeling on your head, try to also focus on your body in relation to that feeling.”

Midway through that sentence, Elise fired at Nalia without looking, but the fairy was able to dodge anyway.

“Okay.” Nina only response to Elise’s shot was a blink of surprise, so she shook her head and leapt up into the air again.

Like the contractor had said, the quickdrop technique was something that would take some continuous effort to develop, and Nalia had quite a lot of spells to go over and optimize, so the two of them were still quite a ways away from completing their respective tasks by the time Elise decided to call it a day and everyone went to sleep.

Specifically, Nalia had finished the ‘first pass’ through about twenty percent of her spells while Nina had reached a point of increasing the speed of her falls very slightly. The fairy had also gotten mostly used to Elise’s random shots, getting hit very rarely after a certain point.

Elise was overall satisfied with the day’s progress. It was just the initial return to training, so being a bit slow was fine, and the group had the time to spare considering the Inishie weren’t going to bother them for a while.

+0+

The next morning, Elise had to speak with Yura in the mindscape to wake her up while Nalia and Nina were already working at making their breakfast.

‘Come on, up and at them! Breakfast is almost ready!’

‘Ugh… I’d really like another hour of sleep, but I’m also really hungry, so fine.’ Was Yura’s reply.

Elise then dropped her back onto the real world and held her steady when it looked like the sudden shift would have caused her to fall down.

Soon after, the four girls were eating that day’s breakfast, which was a set of packaged meals from Danmin that included meat, vegetables and fruits, which could be easily prepared with the help of a campfire.

While they were eating, Elise spoke to Yura:

“I’m surprised you didn’t say anything about your mindscape Room.”

“My Room? Ah, the place I was in when I woke up. I guess I just wasn’t paying enough attention.” Came the reply “It’s an underground cave, right? I liked it, but it didn’t really look like it was finished?” She said uncertainly.

“You’re right.” Elise replied “That’s because I wanted your help to make the best Room possible. The initial idea was making something close to your original home, but I didn’t know what it looked like exactly, so the underground thing is pretty much just the draft.”

“That…” Yura fell silent for a moment “I would really like that. Thank you.”

“Then it’s decided. We’ll do that together after eating.” Elise said before turning to the other two “You two can keep working on spells and quickdrop in the meantime.”

“Understood.” Nalia replied.

“Sure.” Nina said.

And so it was done. After the group ate and talked for a bit, Nina and Nalia walked off a bit to do their respective practices and Yura went back into the mindscape. And she immediately had things to say.

“Hmm… That’s not the right type of earth for the area. The soil had a greater proportion of feldspars and micas in comparison to quartz, so this color isn’t quite right.” She spoke after looking at the wall for a moment.

Elise taught her how to make changes to the mindscape and helped her switch the entire cave to the right type of earth, upon which Yura moved down to the next item on the list “And this area is too cramped. The underground cave was very wide open, leaving a lot of space for the community.”

And thus the underground area of the room was expanded according to Yura’s memories. After that the work of customizing the room continued for a while, with the elf adding on the many buildings from her old home, all with their own distinct styles, the numerous exit tunnels, the support pillars that kept the ceiling from collapsing on top of them…

Elise’s previous two partners hadn’t prepared her for someone who had a lot of interest in architecture, a lot of emotions regarding her lost home and a very keen eye for detail. The contractor was dedicated to helping Yura make the exact Room she wanted, so she grit her teeth and put forth all her effort, rather than suggesting that the place be simplified or anything of the sort.

‘I guess what goes around comes around.’ Elise thought wryly after realizing just how much effort she’d have to put in.

All in all, it took nearly five hours for Yura’s mindscape Room to reach a point where the elf was satisfied. Elise was quite tired at the end of it all, but seeing the other girl’s eyes shine and her smile when looking at everything, she couldn’t help but think that it was worth it.

+0+

By the time that was done, Elise decided that it was time to move on, so she called over Nina and Nalia to report about the progress they had made while she was busy, and the group also ate a small lunch together at the same time.

The duo were still in the middle of advancing in their previous tasks, just as expected, but Yura still felt embarrassed for spending the whole morning having fun while the two were training hard.

“If that’s the case, we can do a little bit of training while on the move.” Elise assuaged her concerns.

“Really?” Yura asked.

“Yeah. You can consider it as sort of a preview for the training we’ll do on our next stop.”

Yura accepted that idea and soon after their lunch was done and Nalia and Nina went into their respective mindscape Rooms while the elf raised her earth platform and began carrying Elise along once again.

“Okay, the idea of this training is improving your ability to create complex earth structures on the fly.” The contractor began to explain “As we’re going along, I’m going to say the name of an object and you’ll have to quickly shape the earth nearby into that object. And you need to try not slowing down as you do it.”

“That sounds… Pretty tough.” Yura admitted “But I’ll try.”

“I’m not asking for perfection right off the bat. This is why we’re training.”

Yura nodded in response, and soon after Elise started the training by declaring “Tree!”

Yura’s face twisted into a grimace of concentration as she forced her magic into the earth away from the platform while still focusing on making it move. The elf instantly realized the main challenge with the training: Given how fast they were moving, she really had to force her magic to move fast and take effect fast if she wanted to actually make an object before being out of range.

She did her best, though, managing to actually create an earth shape after a failed first attempt. That shape was only vaguely tree-like, being a cylindrical pillar that opened up into a mushroom shape at the top, but it was at least something.

“Good for your first attempt. But the platform did slow down a little bit.” Elise pointed out “You’ll have to try and fix that for next time.”

“Okay.” Yura replied.

A few seconds later, Elise called out “Door!” and the process repeated itself.

The next three hours of travel were spent in such a way. The training was fairly difficult, but Elise made sure to give Yura time to rest in between each request, so it wasn’t enough to exhaust her.

They still had more training to do, after all. The overall result was that the elf had a marked improvement in the speed and accuracy of her earth shaping despite the relatively short period. When she commented about that, Elise replied that sometimes a type of training would be particularly effective because whatever skills it trained were relatively undeveloped, but as they got better the rate of improvement would quickly slow down.

She supposed it made sense.

After those three hours, they stopped for another training session, this time in an area that was full of large boulders. The reason for that choice of area became clear right after Elise told Nalia and Nina to do another sparring session, as she instructed Yura to make a pillar of earth under one of them to raise it up.

“Like I mentioned before, this is another variation of the same training.” Elise explained “You’ll have to shift your pillar of earth to make the shapes I call, but since we’re not on the move anymore, I’ll be expecting a lot more detail on your shapes. And there’s also the additional wrinkle of the boulder. If you don’t manage your earth shaping well enough to avoid weakening the structure, then the weight of the boulder will crush the pillar, so that’s another thing you have to consider.”

Yura nodded before turning back to the pillar and trying to mentally prepare herself for what was sure to be another really difficult training session.

Just from the short time she had spent being trained by Elise, she could definitely tell how Nalia and Nina had gotten so strong.