D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

--- Lily ---

Lily spent the rest of the day talking with Thyme about clothing. The dryad new a truly massive amount about the topic, and Lily wouldn't be surprised if the tree in question had invented more than half of the styles she'd seen about. The world just didn't have quite enough distinct culture for them to arise naturally… but if Thyme was brute forcing it? Well that was a different matter.

Lily had turned down the offer of clothes though. Thyme had provided more than enough help, and the books she'd been handed were plenty valuable enough… of course when she returned to her room at the end of the day to find several different storage containers, three of which were filled with clothes, she couldn't help but grit her teeth.

She'd already promised Thyme to test them… Thyme had just ensured she was getting compensated for her work.

The most secure of the containers was actually a series of containers and had the giant size candies. It was a box, with a bag inside it, and inside the bag was a glass jar, and then inside the glass jar was ANOTHER bag. Frankly, Lily didn't understand how that was meant to help but Thyme had certainly ensured that they'd be well protected.

None of it was expanded, unlike the other containers, but they had to be at least a bit magical.

The note Thyme left behind with the setup informed her that she might need to provide the containers with some magic occasionally. Thyme wasn't sure how often.

Conventional logic dictated they needed mana 'basically never' but conventional logic wasn't going to help them here, so instead Thyme recommended just topping them up before bed if possible, but that leaving them for a month should still be safe. If it wasn't? Thyme wanted to know. Lily wasn't sure she'd actually test that part out, but Thyme had said it was an option.

Kat had a good laugh as Lily pouted angrily at the containers. No amount of glares directed towards her girlfriend managed to stimy the flow of laughter… if anything Lily was pretty sure she was just making Kat laugh more. Which… made it rather tempting to keep trying. Kat's laugh was beautiful and Lily enjoyed seeing what Kat's laughter did to Kat's chest.

Not that she'd admit something like that out loud. She wasn't Marigold after all.

In the end though? It had been a big day and Lily was happy to transform and sleep snuggled up against Kat. She still wasn't ready for anything more… but it was just nice… and while Lily did want to spend more time with Thyme, especially after noticing that the dryad might be a touch more lonely then they seemed… Lily went to bed determined to spend the next day entirely with Kat.

Which is how, Lily found herself glaring at the rising sun at fuckknows in the morning as she tried to wipe the sleep from her eyes. Kat had gotten up to spar with Burnice again and Lily, like the fool she was, had insisted on coming along. She'd even managed to find a picnic blanket in the closet so that her new books wouldn't get sand in them. Still Lily couldn't help but let out a long yawn.

*Why did I think this was a good idea? We haven't even eaten breakfast yet! Which, ok, admittedly that's because breakfast hasn't been served and Kat did say I could sleep in a bit more and we could meet up at breakfast… but dammit I said I was going to spend the whole day with her so I'm going to spend the whole day with her!*

Lily slapped her cheeks a few times as she tried to wake herself up a bit more. The fact that Kat was slowly going through katas at the moment wasn't helping matters. For some reason it made Lily want to blink a bunch to get rid of the slow motion effect. Sadly, there was no slow motion effect, and every time she blinked it seemed to be just a bit harder to open her eyes again.

Lily let out another yawn, wincing as she heard her jaw crack slightly. *Oof that is probably not good. Or maybe it is? What even WAS that?* Lily moved her jaw around a bit and found no issues. A few pokes around the area didn't reveal any pain either. Lily tried to lightly bite the inside of her cheeks… and still no issues.

*Perhaps I'm worried about nothing. At least the adrenaline from the scare woke me up… a bit.* Lily brushed off the thought as she got to practicing. The plan was to mess around with spells until she was out of mana, and then read for a bit until her reserves had filled back up again and then switch back.

Now, Lily knew that theoretically that wasn't the best way to train your magic. Distracting yourself with a book would likely increase the time it took for her mana to regenerate fully… but that wasn't really a problem. Lily hadn't properly identified the shadow spells she wanted and she could probably use some more practice with the spells she already knew. Both paper and not.

So that's what Lily did at first. She sent of a bunch of spells and then cracked open a the first book… and immediately realised she'd been forgetting a key part of making her spells better. Tightening up how much magic was used to make the sigils.

Lily really did not enjoy the fact that after just one round of 'tightening' up her spells a bit extended her 'spam spells' time all the way from ten minutes to twenty. Worse, that was just a quick change. She'd mostly just been testing the idea out.

Lily grumbled a bit at that, and asked Kat to provide her some more targets as she read the book on shadows a bit more. It didn't have anything else she really should have been focusing on… but it was interesting enough at least. This one in particularly seemed to be… more of a children's book. Babies first introduction. None of the spells seemed to be much use at all, or even very dangerous.

When Lily said 'basics' she meant basic basic. There was a spell to make a nearby shadow into a circle. A spell to make her own shadow a circle, and then, a really advanced spell to summon up a sphere of shadows… and just have it sit there for a while. None of these were attacks, or even that hard to do with pure manipulation…

Which is part of what lead Lily to realising she was wasting mana. She'd heard over and over again that while you could do a lot of fancy stuff with pure manipulation of your element, it wasn't efficient at all so the fact that it had been cheaper for most part? Clearly an issue that should have been addressed.

So that's how Lily spent the rest of the day. Slowly going over a bunch of mostly useless spells. The only spell Lily found in the entire book that had any practical use was one that let her cloak herself in shadows. Sadly it didn't let her sink into those shadows, but it pulled them off the wall a bit and let out hide behind them.

It looked very weird if you weren't careful with it, but if you were careful? It'd probably be quite good for sneaking around at night.

On the other hand, Kat spent the morning swapping between katas and sparring with Burnice… while Kat manipulated demonic fire above her head. It was a little risky because Burnice liked to bounce around in a fight, but Kat was always careful to keep the flame away from Burnice.

It even lead to Kat taking quite a few hits she might not have needed to if she'd been less focused on the flames, or willing to let Burnice take a hit from them.

Kat wasn't of course, this was just meant to be a friendly spar, and demonic fire could be a real problem if you let it be. Plus… with Burnice's scars Kat was really, really careful with her fire. The last thing Kat wanted was to add to those issues.

It did mean that Kat was overly careful, always keeping the flames as far away from Burnice as she could manage with her current control, but that too was good practice, or so Kat said.

In the afternoon Burnice headed off to relax while Kat and Lily kept practicing. The pair moved off to the ocean where Kat kept a floating sheet of ice around using her powers while doing katas on top of it, and Lily continued on with her books. On the shore of course.

While Lily trusted Kat completely, the whole point of training was to push your limits, and Kat's ice platform had broken apart more than once over the course of the afternoon, so Lily didn't feel bad about her choice.