Chapter 710

Blue stood up, wobbling a little but keeping her feet, steadying herself on the bed. “Ok, I think we’ve been here long enough,” said Blue.

“Are you sure?” asked Kat, “It hasn’t even been ten minutes Blue, you can take a bit more time if you want,”

Blue shook her head, “No this is still a challenge. If the challenge had ended or this was a regular job I’d wait. As it stands the risk of death is non-existent and we are on a timer even if we can’t see it. I am combat capable, unwinded and while a bit of water would be nice I’m not currently willing to use the mana required to summon it properly,”

“What do you mean, ‘summon it properly?'” asked Kat.

Blue marched out of the room, “I’ll tell you if you follow me,” and Kat let out a sigh and did as she was asked. The nursed nodded to the pair on the way out and when they opened the door to the ballroom, they found themselves in another corridor instead. The two maids guarding the entrance were a bit of a surprise though.

Blue reacted by summoning a water ball around the head of the one on the left, while Kat dashed forward to take out the one on the right. Kat was about to simply ‘kill’ them but realised the nurse, the POWERFUL nurse was watching them from the desk so Kat restrained herself. Instead she took a cue from Blue and came up behind the Thyme and put them in a head lock, chocking them slowly as she bound their arms with her tail and locked her legs around theirs to prevent them fighting back.

Once the two Thymes had fainted Blue turned to the nurse and said, “We’ve got two new patients for you!”

.....

The nurse sighed, “Roughhousing just outside my domain. What is this mansion coming to?” Despite their words though, the nurse just walked up to Kat and Blue before taking the Thymes of the pair’s hands and heading for the back room.

Blue kept walking then, and started to explain, “So, anything made with mana is inherently temporary to start off with. The reason for this, is it’s prohibitively expensive to use mana to create ‘real’ things. You can however cheat really easily. Wind doesn’t have this problem at all, and Earth can sort of fake it by making more dirt instead of making it from nothing,

“Water can do a similar thing, but most people just summon ‘fake’ water and go from there. The issue with that is you can’t drink it otherwise it causes issues internally. When the mana in the water runs out it will just disappear and suddenly your body is dehydrated all in an instant and the shock really isn’t good for you.

“If I wanted a drink, I’d need to pull what water there is from the air, drying it out, and potentially making me thirstier as I breathed in all the dry, stale, air. It’s useful in a pinch, but really not something to rely on unless you’re moving a fair distance away or you’re outside where it’s not so big of a deal.”

Kat was halfway through nodding when a thought occurred to her, “Wait... if that’s the case... is all the stuff Thyme makes with magic real or not...?”

“I don’t want to think about that,” said Blue as they cleared another corridor, of Thymes. When it was over she kept speaking, “Yeah no. I don’t even want to consider that. Either Thyme is using a bunch of mana to keep it all from falling apart while in use, or Thyme is using a bunch of mana to make it all real. I think the only idea I want to really consider is Thyme using time magic, which is still really expensive, on themself and building it all by hand with an army of Thymes. That’s probably the most efficient magic wise...”

*Huh... I guess you learning something every day. I don’t know if I’d have guessed time manipulation would be the key to the everything Thyme has made. I also don’t want to know exactly how much mana that would take.* “Is Thyme’s mana capacity really that much of an outlier?” asked Kat.

Blue didn’t say anything as they opened a door only to find a Thyme break room. It was swiftly shut back up, “It is and it isn’t,” said Blue carefully. “Dryads, as a species, have a lot more mana then we do simply because... well they’re all massive trees that take ages to form a sentient consciousness. Like... say for the sake of argument Thyme has ten times the amount of mana I do. Now Thyme MUST have more then that, but for the sake of argument lets go with ten times.

“Thyme’s main body, their tree, is at least a kilometre tall. I don’t even reach six feet. Even if I’m generous and say I’m six foot for the sake of the making the math easy, Thyme is still like 160 times my height, let alone how much wider their body is. When you start thinking of it that way...”

Blue trailed off as if that was all that needed to be said. In many ways it really was. If you considered the fact that Thyme’s body was simply that much larger, there was no way their mana capacity would be small. It would have to be monstrous. Kat wasn’t totally sure the regeneration rate would increase as well, as Kat didn’t know how exactly mana recharged. “That’s a big tree,” said Kat.

Blue nodded again, “Yes. Yes it is. The next question then, is Thyme an outlier amongst dryads? To that, I don’t really know. There aren’t that many dryads, the ones that do exist don’t wander around anywhere near as much as Thyme does and Thyme is OLD. The chance that Thyme only has a 1km tree form and no practice speeding up their mana... I think the world ending tomorrow would be more likely,”

Kat shivered. *You know. It really puts it into perspective. Everyone is scared of the giant monster, whatever it might be. Thyme is another one, in fact they must be humongous. You just don’t notice it at all because Thyme is always slightly crazy or using strange forms. The biggest I think I’ve ever seen Thyme was for that king and queen skit at the end of the Tournament and even then, Thyme wasn’t even close to 500m.*n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

Kat continued struggling to wrap her head around exactly how different a league dryads had to be when compared to normal casters as they cleared out another corridor. This one with three Thymes and no doors. Eventually, Kat had to ask, “Is there any weaknesses to dryads? They seem... kind of ridiculous,”

Blue scoffed, “Says the demon. But... well it really depends how you’re looking at it Kat. Remember they can’t move. Well, I wouldn’t put it past Thyme to move the forest around and transplant it somewhere else, but typically dryads can’t move. If you find their tree, that’s it. Also, as magical as dryads and dryad trees are... for most of their life, they are just slightly better then average trees.

“A lumberjack can cut down a dryad’s tree just as easily as an arch mage, probably easier if they have a good axe. As long as the dryad isn’t awake yet. Well, that or if the dryad is distracted. I’m not entirely clear on how ‘aware’ they are of all their individual parts. Thyme might be... but I think that’s not entirely normal, making so many bodies...”

Kat kicked her way through another lot of Thymes and threw the nearby door open expecting something else underwhelming. Instead, Kat found a master bedroom. It was a tastefully done affair. A King-sized bed pressed against the left wall with a picture of a forest above it. There was another door, presumably to an ensuite and there were two large dressers for clothes. There was also a small writing desk and chair tucked away in the corner. On the opposite side of the room to the bed was a small four person table with a window right next to it. The windowsill was lined by a vine of some kind, lightening up the space and giving it a bit of green.

“Blue over here!” said Kat joyfully. Blue turned away from her door to look at Kat, and smiled at the sight.

“YES!” Blue shouted as she rushed in past Kat and flopped down on the bed without a care in the world. Kat raised an eyebrow at this. *We just went through a dungeon, a storage closet, and a healer’s wing and I know you don’t have the resistance to grime that I do. I really think you should have showered or something before just... jumping on the bed.*

Kat sighed, in the end this wasn’t exactly something she was unused to. So she just rolled her eyes and popped over to the bed, sitting on the corner and waiting for Blue to get it out of her system.