Author's Note: Alright so the first chapter of this story for the New year! Read, Review, Favourite and Enjoy!
Chapter 93: Rest and Recovery
Raphtalia was slow to awaken. It felt like a nightmare, but only the end, when you've managed to overcome a long struggle and was now at peace. That said, her head was pounding and everything was sore, she supposes that's what happens when you get hit with enough lightning to power a metropolis. Then noise makers whirled in her ears and confetti flew over her body.
""""Congratulations Raphtalia!""""
Raphtalia turned to her side and saw that Maple, Tanya, Kuro and Katarina were all gathered into the room with her. Katarina was holding two sticks connected to a large arching banner that read 'Congratulations on Reaching Balance Breaker!' that had been raised into the air above their heads.
"Wha!?" Raphtalia could only utter confusion.
They had a mix of reactions to Raphtalia nearly killing herself achieving Balance Breaker, fear, anger, joy. Maple also knew for a fact how much stress Raphtalia had been under, how much work she had been getting done for country and world. The last thing that someone who has been working hard needs to hear is a scolding, especially when they've achieved a net positive.
"We know how hard you've been working Raphtalia, and we saw how much you got done too!" Maple hugged the taller woman's arm into her own body. "So take a break for a while. You're hurting and you need to heal."
"I'm still going to need the information you have on this Naofumi." Tanya stated bluntly.
"Go ask Sadeena. And while you're at it shoot her for me would you." Raphtalia instructed bitterly and Tanya could only sigh by way of response.
"Fine then." Then the Bow Hero grabbed Katarina and Kuro by the scruffs of their armour and dragged them off. "Come on Duchess and Baroness. You two should know how to get some of this work done too."
When the other three heroes had left a tell tale click echoed as the door was locked. Maple closed the curtains on the room while the ceiling lit up, was this a camping plant that they were inside of?
"Alright take em off." Maple pulled a satchel out of her shield, which was quickly revealed to be filled with various jars of creams and oils as well as bandages. "Doctor Maple needs to change all of your bandages now." Raphtalia sighed as she took off the two piece PJ's the others had dressed her in while she was unconscious, followed up by Maple cutting off her bandages with a pair of scissors until Raphtalia was completely naked from head to toe. "Here's some drinks." Maple handed Raphtalia several bottles of a juice/milk/potion concoction she had created which Raphtalia uncorked and released a lovely aroma into the the room. "Yggdrasil takes a lot out of you, so you'll need it." Raphtalia was taken aback by Maple's statement.
"You're using Yggdrasil on me?" Raphtalia wanted to scold Maple for being a spendthrift.
"All of this stuff is made from Yggdrasil. Don't worry, ever since we got the factory up and running we've been swimming in the stuff around here." While Raphtalia pondered the implications about that as Maple handed her one of the jars. "You'll have to rub this everywhere you don't want me to touch you after you're washed up." Indeed, before the creams and oils could be applied Raphtalia needed to wash up.
"I'm not a child I can clean myself up." Maple had whipped out a wooden barrel filled with green soapy water and had Raphtalia climb into it, shortly thereafter Maple herself changed into a undershirt and shorts and brought out a large loofah on a stick.
"But that's not the point." Raphtalia worked her tail off, so she was going to get pampered and she was going to like it.
Raphtalia sat down as Maple got to work, diligently scrubbing down every part of Raphtalia's body with the loofah brush soaked in suds.
"Do you remember Naofumi?" Raphtalia asked as she looked up to the ceiling, recent revelations fresh in her mind. He controlled the hero summoning but it wasn't just that now was it? No someone that powerful? He would be at the centre of so much more. And she couldn't be certain but it was there, the nagging feeling that there was so much more to him than what she knew, like staring down from up high at some massive bottomless canyon filled with vegetation.
"My dad or the mirror hero?" Raphtalia was tempted, oh so tempted, to voice the information that Sadeena had shared with her.
"Your father, can you describe what he looks like?"
"I can draw a picture." Kaede quickly scribbled a portrait of her father using a piece of paper Maple had taken out of her shield. Raphtalia wasn't surprised that Kaede didn't recognise him. Opposite of Naofumi who was young, clean shaven but had messy hair and piercing angry eyes Kaede's father had neat short hair, a well maintained beard and warm and caring eyes in his forties.
"And your mother?" Another sketched and Raphtalia admitted she had to grimace a little bit. There was a vague resemblance to Raphtalia with pink eyes and mousy brown hair, but the similarities ended there: Maple's mother had scars going down her lips, across her nose and above her eye, and numerous stress wrinkles on top of that, of course she didn't have Raphtalia's ears either. There weren't any demi-humans in Maple's world, or so she believed when she came here. It was weird that the power to transform was the only Demi-human trait that Kaede inherited but it makes more sense if her mother applied some kind of reality altering magic to herself that erased them. "Why's her face all cut up?" Raphtalia asked sounding vaguely offended.
"Mom boxes on the weekend." Kaede stated shrugging her shoulders. "It relieves stress."
"Can you draw pictures of the Mirror Hero and the Katana Hero?" Raphtalia asked by way of follow up. Maple was about to draw a picture of the Katana hero but paused.
"I can't remember what she looked like." Raphtalia thought back to her time training under the Katana hero, every time she thought about her face she instead got this vague feeling that nothing was there. Of course she applied magic that makes people forget what she looks like too.
"I think I can draw the mirror hero though. Where's this coming from?" Maple asked vaguely concerned.
She shouldn't call him that name any more, Naofumi, mirror hero, because she had this terrible feeling they were going to have to kill him and his partner too.
"When I was with him he knew my exact tastes. Foods I've never tasted before made a dance across my tongue so finely I curse myself for eating so fast to this day." Raphtalia relaxed as Maple scrubbed her down, the blissful feeling she was receiving as much from the memory as from Maple's scrub down. Zero attack power meant that no matter how hard she scrubbed Raphtalia's body the only thing she felt was the pleasant feeling of a month of work being washed off of her body. "Two hundred head rests." A field of stones on top of bodies: some burned, some chewed on, some digested, some stabbed or slashed, some left to rot in a cage. "That will be answered for." Maple stopped her scrub as Raphtalia continued talking. "I don't care what he means to us. I don't care what he means to the heroes on the other side of the world." Raphtalia looked Maple straight in the eye. "And I don't care what he means to you." Raphtalia laughed bitterly. "Is this the bitterness of an ant who's been stepped on?" Maple put the sponge on a stick down and held Raphtalia close to her.
"He's my father isn't he?" Maple asked her tone one of realisation.
"...Aye." Raphtalia didn't care what he meant to Maple. Raphtalia didn't care what he meant to her. And Raphtalia especially doesn't care about what he's done for this world. "And I think I'm going to have to kill him."
It didn't make sense to Kaede, her father certainly didn't spend her life training her up like a warrior or a hero, and the Mirror Hero didn't think she'd be here even though he recognised her... Was there more than one Naofumi? There was more than one Raphtalia apparently.
"...Here. I have something to help with that."
It wasn't just the self inflicted lightning tribulation that Raphtalia needed healing for, her entire body was riddled with fractures and internal bruising from grinding up her Sacred Gear for a month. Maple learned her lesson from the old lady, instead of getting enough Yggdrasil to heal her entire body at once Raphtalia was having precisely the amount she needed applied to exactly where she needed it by Maple's tender touch and care. More than just healing, Raphtalia was growing stronger. In the same way that Maple had gone through a tribulation when she unlocked the power of her Balance Breaker so too had Raphtalia, unlike Kuro who changed part of her body into a dragon a channel had been carved through Raphtalia's body, channels. Maple was now managing them, healing magic and potions were mixing together with advanced high tier crafting shields to tell Maple the optimised paths through the channels in Raphtalia's body, the healing strengthened the channels that would help Raphtalia, and removed the ones that wouldn't.
"You're not upset?" Raphtalia asked looking at Maple suspiciously.
"He's my dad. How can I not be upset?" Maple stated shaking her head. "But he always told me, that if I've done something wrong then I need to be prepared to suffer the consequences. In the spirit of that, Dad has done a lot of things wrong, and not just lately, for a really long time by the sounds of things." Naofumi was behind the hero summoning, he was behind the waves, and there were other things too. "I'm not going to help you with your revenge this time. But I get the feeling you don't want me to either now do you?"
"No." Raphtalia looked down at her arm, her muscles had a pleasant feeling of exhaustion in them, the root like scars that had been covering her body had been trimmed down to merely being lightning bolt shaped with only one or two branching paths. When Raphtalia clenched her fist and bulged her muscle she could feel an overwhelming pressure of ki flowing through her veins.
"Fantastic. Come on we have to do your hair next." Maple stated as she went for her scissors next.
"My hair?" The scent of the medicinal herbs had covered it up, but Raphtalia realised that she smelt like burnt hair right now. Maple turned her around to face a mirror in the room and Raphtalia gasped. Not only were large swaths of her hair was burnt black but she had gone bald in a couple of places too. Maybe she had been putting herself under too much stress.
"First lets do some damage control." Maple started by wrapping a cloak around Raphtalia's otherwise nude body, so that she wouldn't be covered in her own hair. Maple started by cutting away all the burnt parts of Raphtalia's hair leaving her with a rather ugly hair cut.
"Well. I can always just use my illusion magic if I have to go out." Raphtalia attempted to look on the bright side but she couldn't find it.
"Patience!" Maple put down the scissors and picked up one of the jars of cream.
Her shield gave her a recipe at some point for a type of fantasy rogaine foam, how does it work? Maple sincerely had no idea. After the cream Maple picked up the scissors again, and a comb and began styling Raphtalia's hair. Very short hairs had started to grow over her head but it was either style her hair or give her a buzz-cut, and on Raphtalia a buzz cut would look absolutely atrocious.
Once Maple was finished Raphtalia looked over herself assessing, shoulder length hair on the right side, shaved to a millimetre on most of the left, the right was combed over to the left, both of her ears were still visible despite the extra inch of hair they had to compete with for the final touch, Maple had prepared a flowery hair pin and inserted it into what hair she had left on her left side and to that she tied three hanging bells. Maple soon took similar measures with the fur on Raphtalia's tail, thankfully hair growth cream wasn't necessary this time, though Maple did opt for a nice blue bow and flower combination.
"There we go! Now come on! Everyone wants to see you again!" Maple got more of her grooming supplies ready.
"Shouldn't I be resting?" Raphtalia asked as Maple went through her bag.
"You were struck by lightning. You can rest once everyone knows that you're not going to fall over and have a stroke!" Saying that Maple continued her grooming Offensive.
Wearing a Kimono for the large breasted like Raphtalia was something of an exercise in contradictions. Women of Japanese ethinicity tend to have small to medium breasts, or at least they use to, so traditional Japanese garb, such as the Kimono, tends to reflect that. This was a slightly less traditional kimono, it was designed in a way that it opens up in the front and exposes most of the bust in the process, that had it's own problems though, and so necessitated the use of a bra.
"This doesn't have a lot of defensive power." Raphtalia stated looking down at the garment Maple had prepared for her. "What if reincarnated tries to attack us while I'm down?"
"The Kimono is made out of knight Spider silk, and has been reinforced by both me and Kuro." Mind you that isn't what Maple was helping her with right now. "For that matter so's the bra." On the subject of which the bra in question was black, large cups for Raphtalia's breasts with numerous strings crisscrossing the straps going down the back for extra support. "Except that the part that's going over your chest has also been layered with slime lacquer." Maple and Raphtalia worked together to get the garment into place, it wasn't easy considering the sheer mass they had to work with but it was in place soon enough, the bottoms matched the top in style if not substance so that just left the red floral Kimono with the pattern of the Sera Lumina blossoms covering it. Maple also helped Raphtalia with the socks and sandals as well. Maple considered make up as well, but she wasn't skilled enough with the subject that she was confident she could enhance on Raphtalia's natural beauty. "Can you walk?" Maple asked watching as Raphtalia struggled to stand up.
"No." Mana, Spirit, Ki, Health. There were a lot of supplements that Maple was willing to supply in order to restore energy lost to the party because of the usual stresses of the battlefield, Stamina was not one of them. Stamina potions tend to be dangerously addictive to the point that it's hard to function without them, even more so now that Raphtalia's already escaped a dangerous downward spiral. So Maple prepared a wheel chair and loaded Raphtalia onto it as she rolled her outside to meet the villagers.
"Raphtalia looks so pretty today." Katarina commented entire upper body sticking out of a window in the mansion while looking at Raphtalia.
"Hmm. Well Raphtalia was already a natural beauty." Kuro stated shrugging her shoulders. "Even if she's been so stressed out lately that her hair's started falling out it's not like there was nothing there for Maple to work with, then you combine together high medicinal and crafting skills..."
"Wait wait! Raphtalia's hair been falling out?" While Kuro and Katarina gawked a terrifying presence was approaching them from behind.
"If I wanted to listen to you two knuckle heads gossip all day I would move my office into the filolial stable!" Tanya promptly knocked the skulls of her fellow heroes together and threw them back to the desks she prepared for them.
"Why are you only making us do this?" Kuro asked as she rubbed her head where Tanya threw her.
"Because unlike Maple, These are things that you two are supposed to know how to do!" Tanya growled by way of reply.
"You sound worst than Mom!" Katarina complained and for her trouble nearly got a pin lodged in her head by Tanya.
The village was really thriving, the destroyed houses were replaced by Camping plants, boats were circling the bay as they pulled in the harvest from the nearby fish farm and the fields were producing rich crops of modified grains and fruit. To the north a continuous flow of gold, silver and copper was coming out of the mine that Maple was maintaining using the shield of the Beast king producing more money on the regular. Filolials hauling wagons full of goods were entering and exiting the village like clockwork delivering food and other goods of the like, more money was coming in than anything else.
"What are you even using all of this gold for anyway?" Raphtalia asked while she looked at Maple strangely while gesturing to the piles of ore that Maple was sucking into her shield.
"Reinforcements." Maple stated looking weirdly proud of herself. "I can max out most of my reinforcements just by buying them using the Projectile reinforcement method so that's exactly what I'm doing!" The Projectile method was simple, use money to buy unlocked weapons, proficiency, rarity, skill points, stat points the list went on, all at greater end results than what she would get by doing it 'the right way.' Pay to Win Players were truely unrivalled in raw stats. "But I can't just siphon out all the kingdom's money." Raphtalia was reminded of a nightmare she had once of Maple sucking the entire planet into her shield like the gluttonous little black hole that she was. "All the coins that I'm using for my shield I've made myself." Maple had a weirdly proud look on her features.
"Then what are you using the money you're collecting for?" Raphtalia asked through gritted teeth.
"Weapons and Accessories!" Maple stated while she gestured around the village.
Gem Furnaces were blaring in the next part of the village the two heroes visited. What's a Gem Furnace? Maple saw a documentary once about how to create artificial gemstones, take a grain of diamond sand, seal it into a vacuum chamber, fill it with methane and hydrogen gas, burn the combo, and watch the gemstone grow, if you want to make it different colours like a ruby or a sapphire then you need to add things like aluminium ions or the like. Maple wasn't only using the gemstones that were being grown artificially, but she was using a lot of them. The Filolials weren't just pulling one or two wagon's at a time, thanks to the Helping hands accessories multiple rows of them were being dragged around, and many of villagers were training to get the hand of them too, in other cases there were magic rods, weapons spewing flames, several lemo's could even be seen assembling accessories together like they were working a factory.
"I thought we were the ones making weapons for the army..." Raphtalia was blatantly shocked.
"And you are, we're just making accessories and potions." Maple replied, which actually brought them to the next topic, or rather that's where it would inevitably turn out when Raphtalia saw the five story high Bio-plant.
"Maple... what have you been doing to my home?" Raphtalia sounded like she might've been a little angry now.
"It's a factory." Maple piped up defensively. "It's producing a steady stream of Yggdrasil potion for the upcoming fight with the directional beasts." Maple looked weirdly proud for some reason. "I made it when I was experimenting with the bio-plants during my 'bishop' training." Raphtalia just sighed. Her sleepy little village was being warped into a national super power.
"Huu. I need to start training with my Balance Breaker soon but I'm afraid that I'll end up breaking Q'Ten Lo." Raphtalia stated eyes wandering off into the distance.
"Why do you look at me when you say that?" Maple asked looking nervous.
"Bason told me that the term 'Balance Breaker' gets it's name from the fact that it's supposed to be a power that has the potential to upset the balance of power in the world." Raphtalia then pointed at Maple's 'Factory' with her finger her voice full of accusatory tone.
"That is a unlimited supply of the strongest healing potion in the world! One sip of that stuff was enough to take a old woman on the brink of death and turn her into a supper soldier, some people even treat them as a potion of Youth!" As Raphtalia was about to further her rant.
"I know and that's just the normal quality ones." Raphtalia blinked stupidly as Maple took out a pair of potions from her shield and handed them both to Raphtalia who read the description her weapon gave her.
'Yggdrasil: Quality Normal. A potion said to be refined from the sap of the world tree. Not only does it heal every wound in the body, but it also strengthens all of the formerly damaged areas of the body.'
And then the second description.
'Yggdrasil: Quality Legendary. The True sap of the world tree, this potion will heal every injury in the body, restore lost limbs and even push back the sands of time. Dramatically strengthens every cell in the body and even increases the flow of Ki. Every step of the process from the growth of the raw materials to the crafting of the individual potions have been methodically meticulously refined in order to achieve the highest possible quality. Truely the work of someone with some kind of potion crafting disease.'
"Maple. Is this what you used earlier to heal me?" Raphtalia asked indicating the bottle of Legendary Grade potion.
"Obviously!" Maple looked even prouder of herself than what she had before. "I would never use a half baked potion for you Raphtalia!" Raphtalia checked her stats again.
"Five digits..." There was not a single stat of Raphtalia's that was below five digits when before she was going strong at four, although her proficiency with her hammer was pretty high, there weren't many of Kuro's Noble Phantasms or other tracings that had been fed to her hammer yet either, chances were good that this sudden jump in stats was from Maple's antics with the potion/lotion from a little while ago.
"Huu. Now that I've got my Balance Breaker unlocked I should got see Kuro about getting my hammers strengthened." Raphtalia stated simply while she quietly screamed on the inside. Forget mass producing super soldiers like the granny, Maple had created the fountain of eternal youth. She only hoped that her own Balance Breaker was a little more normal. With this Tanya's 'office' building was the group's next stop.
"Thanks for getting me out of there before Tanya killed me." Kuro stated sitting on a chair in the hallway. "So then, you turn your hammer into the weapons you want me to copy, I make a trace of them, drop them into your hand, we move onto the next one, and the next one after that." Raphtalia nodded her head in understanding. "Let me know when you wanna stop, we don't want you losing power in the long term."
"All of them." Raphtalia stated as she started switching between different hammer forms for Kuro to see. "After my short little sabattical I'm going straight back to grinding this thing." Raphtalia stated as she indicated her hammer. "I'm not going to have any time to waste on coming to you every time I've got a few more hammers that I want you to trace."
"You aren't afraid of losing access to stats provided by the hammer?" Kuro stated and Raphtalia's glanced over at her stats that were clocking in at the tens of thousands.
"I'm pretty confident in my stats." Raphtalia explained eyes dull and annoyed. Kuro just shrugged her shoulders and got to work.
"I'll let you two work. Granny wants me to practice flying more today." Saying that Maple left the mansion to go terrorise some more hapless monsters flying in the sky.
"You're not going with her?" Raphtalia asked looking at Kuro with curiosity.
"This is my sacred gear training." Maple's Gear had been built around her slew of transformations and Wood based elemental root, Kuro's was built around her Infinite Sword Sea and metal based elemental root, what this means in layman's terms is that the bigger the sea gets the stronger her sacred gear was going to become, and that meant weapons. Lots of Weapons. Besides once they were finished Kuro was going to skim Raphtalia's transformations for anything that she doesn't have for her sword yet. "Aside from this I'm gonna be using Time magic to strengthen them up even more."
"You have a method of making them even stronger?" Raphtalia didn't like that at all.
"It's not that bad." Kuro rolled her eyes by way of response. "A Noble Phantasm's power is directly tied to their history. The more History that they have, IE the older that they are, the more powerful that they get." Kuro stated making her logic known as she started dropping traced hammers into Raphtalia's free hand.
"Why not do that to all of your Noble Phantasms then?" Raphtalia asked looking confused.
"The Stronger they get the higher the level cap I need to use them. I've been grinding with my gear with Katarina and Rishia but I only have so much time in the day to do that and all the other things I need done."
Raphtalia nodded her head while she looked at her stats. From that point into the night and into the next day the two of them continuously created new hammers and dropped them into Raphtalia's hands in order to copy them all one by one if necessary, breaking only to eat, sleep, and take part in the other necessities of daily life. With each new hammer that landed in her hand her overall stats were jumping up by the hundreds, a drop in the bucket compared to the current her, but she was only in the weak side of her hammers for now. The amount of stats she would receive would gradually rise as she moved on to stronger and stronger hammers, before they begin a sharp decline from her stronger hammers were locked out by increasing stats. The hammer was on this rock a lot longer than they were, and Maple gave her materials from the other world and the waves too, but Kuro still found the rare opportunity to make a wholly new hammer for Raphtalia. Eventually the predicted fall in stats came as they crossed the thresh-hold of strong hammers and Raphtalia's stats eventually dropped, the progressively stronger and stronger hammers being locked out from their levels being too high. But Kuro wasn't satisfied with just that.
"Now we move onto the meat of the operation." Kuro started with a hammer familiar to Raphtalia.
"I don't need you to upgrade Mjornir." Raphtalia stated as Kuro began manifesting the familiar weapon.
"Well. It's not like there's many war hammer type Noble Phantasms in the Sea." Kuro dismissed the half finished tracing. "Well as long as we're going to be working from scratch we should think about what kind of Virtue Weapon you wanna unlock from this." They had confirmed a pattern by now, the first Noble Phantasm copied into the Weapon determines what Virtue that you unlock. Even if you do intend to eventually have a version of all of the weapons in the Sea in your own weapon this was still an important part of the power up process.
"Trash seems to know all of the curse series by heart." Raphtalia stated as she held her chin in her hand. "Maybe we should see how much he knows about the various virtues as well."
Review Section:
coolkid0806: I was kind of hoping to inspire those kinds of feelings. They're sort of happening at the same time, time is a little wonky in all honesty. And I don't know, I'm trying to include everything that I can think of that needs to be covered.
Yu Narukaze: 7 feet 5 inches, Naofumi's went overboard with the growth spurt inducing food and growth bonuses, Raphtalia pushes eight feet with the old fashion wooden sandals that she wears.
Captain Imaginat: We never see Kaede's parents in the light novel, so here we are. With the godly power to leave mortal copies of themselves on any world that they visit they can do or say pretty much anything about themselves, Naofumi was born in Japan, in the web novel at the end the backstory the Shield and Hammer weapons gave was that Raphtalia was the daughter of a European business magnate that became pen pals with Naofumi who then moved to Japan for college with Naofumi. And yes, your right, but Naofumi already has plenty of reasons to hate himself at this point in time, but no Kaede didn't grow up from levelling like a demi-human would, she went through a tribulation that changed her body to what her growth corrections says she should look like. Maple wound up in Japan because she was born there.
RonaldM40196867: Glad you like it, happy new year. Probably. Well the only reason I posted it was because a bunch of people told me they wanted to read it.
Pokemonever1994: Kind of. Hope the above explanation clarifies things. Not really no.
Nightshadegirl: Sorry. Yeah, we established this a while ago. Sorry, never watched the Owl House.